Aquaculture irrigation combination: Newly emerging pond system reclaims wastewater for hydroponics, fisheries, and endlessly renewable fuel

From Water Efficiency:

Call it aquaculture efficiency or, perhaps better, ultra-everything efficiency-conserving freshwater is only the first-stage benefit here. Beyond this comes water reclamation for reuse, then tightly integrated energy efficiency (virtually, all free, low-tech solar), and next, food production efficiency, free fertilizer byproduct efficiency, bounteous biomass production efficiency surpassing—by at least two- or three-fold—any other known biomass source, and, at the end, a virtually unlimited loop of water recycling efficiency.

Properly speaking, the system itself is called the integrated modular production system (IMPS). Just now it is being implemented at one pilot site to relieve water-challenged cattle feedlots in Texas, and is gaining a foothold internationally. Its inventor Clifford Fedler, a professor of civil engineering and associate dean at the graduate school at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, coined the name in the course of spending a dozen years testing and developing it.

Fedler’s IMPSs essentially take self-cleaning wastewater treatment ponds and equip them with hydroponics. Added in the latter stages are tertiary ponds in which, he explains, “the water has been naturally denitrified by the right combination of plants and sunlight,” sufficient to support pools teeming with fish and enormous, almost hard-to-believe aquaculture crops.

Read more of this article from Water Efficiency by clicking here.

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