Rain Barrels Collect A Valuable Resource
It rarely rains in Santa Barbara, and when it does, it's an event as remarkable as the first sunny spring day after a long Chicago winter.
During a recent storm, I put on my rain gear and went for a walk. I watched rainwater sheet off my roof, down the driveway, and into the road. I followed the runoff down the street and into a gutter, which bore the sign "Flows straight to ocean". Sadly, i had just witnessed the entire suburban hydrologic cycle.
We have designed a build environment that, for the most part, treats water as a waste product to be disposed of as quickly as possible. The reality is just the opposite however - rain water is a precious resource.
The City of Santa Barbara realizes that water conservation is vital to the future of our community. They have been supplying rain barrels to residents for half price. We picked some up and installed them, and as I write, the new barrels are filling up in my backyard. (Info on City's earlier barrel program and the cost is still posted here. The City may "roll out" a new batch of barrels in the spring.)
Here are some photos of our new rain catchment system. We elevated the barrels to provide pressure at the outflow. They are piped together so they fill up and drain together. As you can see they fit in a small side yard. Rain barrels or a cistern are an economical way to decrease the amount of potable water that you use in the garden.
There are lots of options for rain catchment systems, from highly engineered underground cisterns to small scale residential systems like this one. Arcadia Studio understands the importance of water conservation and explores water catchment systems for our clients whenever possible.
Chlorine-free natural swimming pools
Have you ever gone swimming in a mountain pond and enjoyed the freshness of the water – perfectly clear, without a trace of chlorine? What if you could have a backyard pool that used nature’s water cleansing systems instead of chemicals, which kill everything in the pool short of the swimmer?
A team of German researchers and designers has done just that. Here’s the basic idea: the pool is divided into two roughly equal sized areas: a swimming zone, and a regeneration zone. The swimming zone is not really any different than a “normal” pool - it can be a lap pool, or a bean shaped pool, or a pond. The regeneration zone, however, is where interesting things happen.
Water spills over from the swimming zone into the regeneration zone, where aquatic plants rooted in gravel act as a biofilter. Water cleansing is achieved with zooplankton, phytoplankton, and water plants. As the water filters through the plants’ root zones and a sediment filter tank, all the impurities are essentially “eaten” by natural microorganisms.
This year's ASLA conference included a lecture by Ranier Grafinger and James G.Robyn, two pioneers in the industry, who presented a slideshow of successful natural swimming pool projects in Europe. Even public swimming pools, used by hundreds of people a day, are kept sanitary without the use of chemicals. Natural swimming pools, it seems, are the way of the future for those interested in decreasing chemical exposure and enhancing the swimming experience.
If you are interested in more information on natural swimming pools, contact meg@arcadiastudio.com
Exciting new local developments in greywater usage
Ever wondered where the water goes after you take a shower? It probably goes down the drain and mixes with sewage and all the junk that you pour down the drain, then ends up at a treatment plant, where chemicals are used to clean the water before it's released into the ocean. For years, sustainability experts have bemoaned the fact that shower and laundry runoff, called greywater, is not re-purposed to water plants. There are lots of good reasons to do this - to save water, save money, reduce infrastructure costs, and decrease chemical use.
A couple years ago, I built an outdoor shower in my suburban backyard. I love my outdoor shower. Its runoff keeps my tree ferns and pink ginger and bananas lush; these subtropical plants thrive on water that would otherwise be wasted. I pretend that I’m in Hawaii when I’m taking a shower in my greywater garden. It never ceases to please me to watch the runoff fill little mulch-filled troughs and go straight to my thirsty plants. Hard to believe that something so innocuous was, until recently, illegal.
But times have changed. Policy advocates and officials have finally re-written the section of the California building code pertaining to greywater, making it legal. It's about time.
The City of Santa Barbara has taken a leading role in the process, and is now promoting a permit-less laundry to landscape system, encouraging people to re-use soapy laundry water in a simple system fine-tuned by our own local greywater expert, Art Ludwig. His website,Oasis Design, is a wealth of information about greywater and its uses.
Arcadia Studio is excited about this opportunity to be part of California’s efforts to reduce the use of potable water in the landscape, and we're eager to incorporate these sensibilities into our designs.
Arcadia’s UCSB Housing Project is LEED Gold
The movement towards building sustainable landscapes and architecture marches forward, and Arcadia Studio is always proud to see one of its projects take the lead, or in this case, LEED. Inexpensive pun aside, the University of California's San Clemente Student Housing Project has officially been given a "Gold" rating by the U.S. Green Building Council.
The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ is a stringent 100 point based design guideline that awards projects points for specific attributes of sustainability. For a project to achieve a Gold rating, it must gather a minimum of 60 points, which is no small feat. The press release explains that a lack of green standards for housing or residence hall construction forced the design team to get creative. "A lot of hard work went into this," said Wilfred Brown, executive director of UCSB's Housing & Residential Services. "We had to look at what was being done for industrial construction, for new classrooms, or laboratories, and adapt it for housing."
Arcadia's Senior Associate Landscape Architect Brian Brodersen led our design effort on this project. Congratulations, Brian ~
The full announcement lives here, as do pictures of the project.
LEED Study Group An Eye Opener
As a few members of the staff and I study for the LEED certification test, we're struck by the system's attention to detail.
LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) has been developed by the US Green Building Council as a way to quantify a project’s sustainability. Five brave Arcadians have committed to taking the test in spring 2009. Being LEED certified will help us guide projects toward a higher level of sustainability.
One of the things that amazes us as we go through the dense study guide is the amount of thought that has gone into the system. Imagine – you are making up guidelines for architects and builders all over the country. Big cities, small towns, cold climates or deserts – this system has to be inclusive enough to span the wide geography of the states, yet specific enough to actually measure something. The more we learn, the more respect we have for the rating system.
One of the many applications of LEED certification is that it helps us avoid “greenwashing”. Arcadia gets inundated with fliers and emails about this or that new green product. How do we differentiate between the truly green products and those that have just been re-named and re-packaged? By researching and implementing products that truly decrease the carbon footprint of our projects, we provide examples of beautiful, low-impact designs.
Our collective respect for the nuanced details of the LEED system makes me more excited to become certified - I think I’ll go memorize some EPA standards!
I'll be posting more about what practical applications of LEED we're discovering as the study group forges on towards the test. Click here for more info on LEED.