Stormwater infrastructure is our largest underground, most critical (without it, flooding would occur) and most expensive infrastructure to replace. It is the only link between rainfall (our only free water source) and our waterways/oceans. The only openings into this massive infrastructure are the drains.
The problem starts with the fact every stormwater drain every installed has been open 24/7 to everything the wind, rain, gravity and humans carry to the drain from the day of installation, up to 200 years.
Over decades, more drains have become free garbage bins for plastics, cigarette butts, construction waste, road runoff, lawn clippings, hydrocarbons, heavy metals and much more. This waste is transforming relatively clean rainwater into what is now considered “contaminated wastewater”.
This contaminated water makes our waterways toxic, contaminating our groundwater, killing bio-diversity and making our waterways unfit for human use and consumption. The latest bad news is Toxic Algal Blooms are now scientifically linked to Dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Motor Neurone Disease (MND) in humans.
On top of all of this, we are simply wasting this most precious of all our resources, second only to oxygen.
How does this happen? When developers develop land, they install gas, electricity, sewer and stormwater before laying the road on top. Then all of these infrastructures are gifted or handed to Councils, Municipalities and Governments for free to look after from that point on. All of these infrastructures are allocated budgets for maintenance, reactive maintenance and replacement except stormwater infrastructure.
This means they own and abandon it. Decades later, here we are with contaminated waterways.
ARI Water has developed a new mass water filtration material and combined it with a smart design to bring a device to market that is made to suit any drain. It captures the waste and filters the water at the only openings into that drain. This protects the infrastructure from blockages (a major cause of flash flooding) and the connected groundwater and urban/coastal water environments.
Proven at every level and award-winning, the Stormwater Filtration Device or SFD is a common-sense solution to this global problem. The technology most importantly opens up this massive source of free water to reuse with our goal to make it a component of future water security using the trillion-dollar of infrastructure already in the ground.