The goal is to keep the chloride in the Solvay Settling Basins from reaching Nine Mile Creek, Onondaga Lake and groundwater and there's a way to prevent that while restoring wildlife habitat and generating a renewable energy resource.
Conventional landfill closures keep water out by using clay and plastic, but with funding from Honeywell, SUNY-ESF Forest Engineer Doug Daley is developing a natural cover using shrub willow, a plant that uses a lot of water, to do the same thing. It's called ecological engineering.
"The ecological engineering approach would be taking the plants that are already there and modify the environment a little bit to give them a boost, give them a leg up," Daley said. "We're trying to modify those water processes to maximize how much goes off through evaporation and transpiration."
Terry Ettinger tells us how ecological engineering is helping to keep groundwater clean.
The dense canopy of the willow traps a lot of rainfall right on the leaf surfaces and evaporates from there, so it never reaches the ground. And what water does reach the ground is then evaporated or transpirated right back into the foliage. The other advantage to the willow is as the root system becomes better established it helps to stabilize the loose soils of the Solvay Waste beds."
"We are stabilizing the soil, the waste material that's out there. Areas that are unvegetated can be revegetated. From a soil stabilization standpoint, we're cutting way down on wind erosion, so we're not getting anything moving off the site in the form of a waste product," said Daley. "What we're proposing is somewhat of a monoculture, that is it's got one type of plant which is shrub willow, but we are still getting lots of other wildlife benefits. We will get songbirds moving into the willow and they'll stay."
Now even though this willow is growing in very difficult and contaminated soils, it can still be harvested as a renewable resource and turned into a variety of products.