SEEN IN SOUTH AFRICA
Most people who travel to foreign countries go to historical sites, museums, nature experiences and exotic shops. I’ve been to 19 foreign countries and have not spent one dime in any of them. No souvenirs, no museums, nothing. Of course, I’m always going to speak so my hosts take care of meals, lodging, tickets, etc. Who needs knick-knacks?
What I do is visit farms and look for cutting edge practical ecological solutions. I love alternative construction, energy, and sewage systems. Fittingly, then, my recent trip to South Africa yielded two fascinating additions in the energy and sewage department.
I spent a couple of days at a permaculture farm in East London where a guy built a gasification unit to run a generator. South Africa is about 40 percent under-powered for electricity. With its abundant sunshine, I assumed lots of rural folks would be investing in solar panels to make up for the rolling blackouts.
But the countryside is full of biomass. Lots of squatty trees and bushy woody material. The problem with solar is of course battery storage—and the eventual waste stream---and the intermittent generation. You can’t have power when you want it, unless you have an expensive and environmentally-questionable bank of batteries. The green leaf is the ultimate solar panel.
With two cylinders about 3 feet tall and 18 inches in diameter, the gasification unit runs an internal combustion engine on hydrogen. Using wood chunks approximating the size of a soft ball, the chambers separate hydrogen from wood and shoot it into the carburetor; the throttle is hooked to a fan that regulates the burn rate. The beautiful thing about this set-up is that it can run continuously (you can refuel while it’s running) and anytime you want. It generates no exhaust and the only waste product is a teaspoon of mineral-rich ashes every few hours.
The problem with the government funding solar panels and wind turbines is that it prejudices the marketplace against simpler backyard solutions like this. I know a guy in the U.S. who spends his life driving coast to coast in a pickup truck powered by a wood gasification unit. I always thought it was a bit impractical for automobiles, but as a way to generate electricity to power EVs or your farmstead, now there’s a new twist that I hope some engineering entrepreneur will develop. I’m ready to buy.
Second was a trickle tower sewage system. I don’t like conventional septic systems because they often leak into groundwater, are not mobile, and do not leverage the nutrients or water. This farmer had a water-based system that flowed into a conventional septic tank. But instead of the effluent flowing into a leach field, a pump sent it up into a 12-ft. tall trickle tower. In septic tanks, anaerobic bacteria digest the chunks and the effluent goes to a leach field.
The trickle tower (Tinkle Tower? Ha!) was a 3-tiered set of 3 ft. X 3 ft.X 2 ft. high totes filled with small gravel. Holes in the bottom allowed the liquid to drip (trickle) from the top ones into the bottom ones. Aerobic microbes on the aggregate digested the effluent, keeping the nutrients but eliminating odors and unsanitary components. A pipe up on top of the tower had tiny holes drilled into its bottom to let the effluent feed the system.
A collection tray (concrete) at the bottom of the tower sent the water into a holding tank where it was used as fertigation in a permaculture food forest. I stuck my nose in the water in that collection tray and it had zero odor. This satisfied all my criteria for acceptable water-based sewage systems: leveraging the fertility, keeping it out of the ground water, and a portable distribution system.
The number of simple, practical solutions to global problems is astounding. We humans labor under the burden of making the simple unnecessarily complex. Couple that with anti-ecology and you have a recipe for dysfunction. Like chemical fertilizer instead of compost.
What is your favorite simple solution you’ve seen somewhere?