The search for lower cost water sources in the Arctic

By Ken Johnson

The search continues for technology with lower costs for water systems in the far north. One of the primary areas of this search is decentralized (individual water and sewage treatment systems in each house) wastewater technology and water re-use technology. The use of decentralized wastewater treatment is not new, and in fact it has provided a low-cost way of treating wastewater for rural homes in the south since the 1940s.

Technical innovations of the past 25 years have facilitated the expansion of decentralized water and water re-use systems, and even advanced the use of this technology in the urban environment.

In the context of Canada’s far north, climate, ground conditions and community isolation create expensive problems for piped residential servicing. In the City of Yellowknife, development costs, including roads and drainage, are over $120,000 per lot. A study in 2001 suggested that a comparable development cost for a water re-use system could be less than $70,000 per lot.

Considering that approximately 55%, or 10,000 litres, of the water used in a typical Yellowknife household each month is for laundry and flushing toilets, there is an opportunity to save money by treating and recycling it for these uses.

The Yellowknife study compared the cost over a 20-year period for a typical residential piped water and sewer system and for a water re-use system. It concluded that water re-use could save approximately 40% of the overall cost, with the most significant part of this cost reduction associated with the elimination of putting pipes in the ground.

Typical unit processes of a water re-use system considered for Yellowknife included a septic tank for primary treatment, a biofilter followed by a slow sand filter for secondary treatment, and ozonation for disinfection of the water before it is re-used. Implementing a water re-use system in a house would incorporate changes to the plumbing and electrical systems, and the building structure. The most important part of the system was the plumbing, which had to ensure a separation of the drinking and non-drinking water supply systems.

Unfortunately, the Yellowknife initiative was not advanced beyond the conceptual design phase.

In the State of Alaska, more than 2,600 rural homes lack running water and sewage collection systems. Existing water and sanitation systems include centralized laundry locations called washeterias, central water points, individual wells and in-ground systems, water and sewer truck or trailer haul systems, and piped water and sewer systems. All of these operate on a user-pay principle with no operating subsidies, which is contrary to the considerable operating subsidies provided to water and sanitation systems in the Canadian north.

Decentralized systems with individual wells and septic systems are already in use in certain regions of Alaska. These are helped by the favourable in situ soil conditions. Trailer haul systems are also used; these are a scaled down version of northern Canadian truck-haul systems. Four-wheel all-terrain vehicles in the summer and snowmobiles in the winter pull specially designed trailer-mounted water or sewage containers.

Conventional, community-wide piped systems in Alaska are increasingly expensive to construct, maintain and replace. The available capital funding cannot meet the demand for new systems and the rehabilitation of aging systems, which is estimated to cost close to $1.4 billion USD. As well, many communities cannot afford the high operation and maintenance costs associated with piped or haul systems.

These emerging realities prompted Alaska to embark on the Alaska Water and Sewer Challenge in 2013 to hire groups of specialists to develop and implement decentralized water and water re-use systems.

The process of selecting companies to do this work was unusual, because it did not include the typical “requests for proposal”. Instead, it asked for “expressions of interest”. The project also included seed funding of approximately $1.5 million to pay the selected companies to research and develop a useable technology. Six companies, out of an initial 18 that applied in the initial phase, advanced to the competition’s second phase, which ended with the presentation of proposals in late 2015.

Phase three of the project was completed in 2017, with the development and testing of prototypes of the top three proposals from the second phase. The results of phase three were presented to the project’s steering committee. All three of the prototypes were tested, and the steering committee settled on the process technology that separates greywater from urine and feces with a dry toilet system. The only technology advancing is the prototype developed by the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Greywater from the kitchen sink, laundry, shower, and bathroom sink will be recycled and made available at these locations as wash water for uses other than drinking and cooking. Separating the waste sources into a wash water system and a dry toilet was judged to be a means of eliminating the addition of “black water” into the treatment process.

Work is underway to rollout the system with a number of pilot projects. One of the projects is a pilot test of dry separating toilets to evaluate how well it may be accepted by home owners. Another rollout for the pilot projects is the installation of a system in a student residential building at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, which will be a first step before rolling out into unserved communities.

The program’s current goal is a secure, safe source of at least 55 litres of running water per person, per day in a four-person household. Wastewater management is an integral part of the Alaska system design, along with its introduction into existing housing units.

In Canada, there is cautious optimism about the successful outcome of the Alaska Water and Sewer Challenge. Certainly, any successful technology may also have applications in northern and remote regions of Canada.

Ken Johnson is with AECOM. This article appears in ES&E Magazine’s February 2020 issue.