LOW←TECH MAGAZINE English

Urban Fish Ponds: Low-tech Sewage Treatment for Towns and Cities

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Image: Fish ponds in the East Kolkata Wetlands – the largest sewage-fed aquaculture system in the world today. Source: Edwards, 2008. [^8]

After we eat and drink, we excrete into toilets, which use water to flush our effluent into municipal sewage systems. By and large, the resulting sewage is either untreated, or treated in different kinds of wastewater treatment plants, the most advanced of which are expensive to run and have high energy demands. ¹

But even if sewage is treated, effluent is still high in levels of nitrogen, phosphorous, dissolved oxygen, and biological matter—essential nutrients for life on Earth. This causes eutrophication. The high levels of these nutrients lead to algal blooms, which in turn may produce toxins leading to mass fish deaths and biodiversity loss in rivers, lakes, and oceans. ²

Essentially, the core of the issue is that rather than nutrients being recycled, as occurs in most ecosystems, it’s a one-way flow. Fixing these problems by, for example, making water use more efficient, or using more energy-intensive sewage treatment plans, doesn’t solve the root of the problem: the nutrient cycle is leaky. And you can’t fix a leaking sink by changing the amount or kind of water you use.

Too much of a good thing

If we want to fix the leaking sink, we need to move away from the idea that human waste is inherently toxic, or that human activity is always bad for the environment. This way of thinking is grounded in the assumption that humans are somehow separated from nature. The logical conclusion of this assumption, then, is to separate us from natural cycles even more: building more refined, chemically and energy-intensive sewage treatment, building hard boundaries between food production and watersheds, and, failing that, using large-scale geoengineering experiments to clean our rivers.

But the main issue here is not that we are somehow toxic and so a burden to our environment. It’s that the nutrients we are releasing into the environment are too highly concentrated. This is especially the case when it comes to the “problem” of eutrophication. Caused by high-nutrient wastewater and agricultural run-off, it is generally thought as a bad thing. But consider the Greek root of the word: “becoming well fed.”

The main issue is not that we are somehow toxic and so a burden to our environment. It’s that the nutrients we are releasing into the environment are too highly concentrated.

Eutrophication is only bad because good nutrients like nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous, necessary for the majority of biotic life, are too concentrated—causing rapid algal growth, leading to too little oxygen in the water, as well as too many toxins produced by algae, both of which are deadly to fish. However, fish eat algae, so if algae growth were to be slowed down a bit, fish populations would multiply instead. The problem is not that wastewater is polluted, but that there is too much of a good thing, too highly concentrated for the ecosystem to absorb.

How to fix a leaking sink

I first learned about the system of treating sewage through aquaculture when I lived in Hanoi. There, I found out that it’s actually very common, especially in poor agricultural communities, to reuse human waste for production.

Image: An overhung latrine on a fish pond in Vietnam. Source: UNEP International Environmental Technology Centre. (2002). Environmentally Sound Technologies for Wastewater and Stormwater Management: an International Source Book (Vol. 15). International Water Assn.

In countries like Vietnam and Indonesia, toilets are often placed above fish ponds. Human and livestock waste may also be collected manually and put in fish ponds. Why? Stimulated by the added nitrogen, phosphorous, and carbon, algae and phytoplankton grow rapidly and start breaking down the nutrients and bacteria and produce oxygen. As oxygen levels go up, fish are able to swim in the water and eat the algae and phytoplankton. Then the fish are caught and sold on the market. Finally, when the pond is drained, fish droppings and any remaining sediments can also be used to fertilize surrounding crops, like rice or fruit trees.

In China, the use of excreta in agriculture and aquaculture has a tradition of centuries. During the communist period, many fish farmers had limited access to fish feed and local state cooperatives started organizing human waste collection systems. Eventually, in many Chinese cities, up to the 1990s, trucks and boats collected human manure in cities—some run by the state and some clandestine, illegal operations—and transported them to aquaculture operations in peri-urban land. From 1952 to 1966, about a third of fertilizers (which includes fish feed) used in China came from nightsoils, and by 1966, 90% of excreta were recycled. ³ Incidentally, today, massive seaweed production off the coast of China has likely greatly reduced the likelihood of eutrophication—an accidental form of bio-remediation and nutrient recycling. ⁴

Image: Sewage water being pumped into a fish pond in the outskirts of Hanoi, Vietnam. Source: Edwards, 2005. [^15]

Image: Wastewater after treatment in fishponds, Hanoi. Source: Edwards, 1996. [^5]

One interesting large-scale example is the system that emerged in the outskirts of Hanoi in the 1960s. Hanoi, the capital of the newly independent communist nation, fighting a drawn-out war against Western occupying forces, had no municipal wastewater treatment. Sewage led out into two rivers, which flowed south and eventually merged with the Red River.

During the communist period of collectivization of farmland, Vietnamese farmer cooperatives were excluded from the international market and so often used whatever resources available to them to feed fish, such as slaughterhouse wastes or spoiled grains. Seeing the untreated wastewater in the canals—a resource out of place—farmers started pumping it into large ponds.

Seeing the untreated wastewater in the canals—a resource out of place—farmers started pumping it into large ponds.

After trial and error, and investing the little they had in infrastructural improvements, they determined the right sewage-and-freshwater ratio needed that would dilute the wastewater enough so the fish wouldn’t die.

Image: A local retail fish market in Yen So commune. Anders Dalsgaard. Source: Thi Phong Lan, Nguyen, et al. \"Microbiological quality of fish grown in wastewater-fed and non-wastewater-fed fishponds in Hanoi, Vietnam: influence of hygiene practices in local retail markets.\" Journal of Water and Health 5.2 (2007): 209-218.

Farmers also grew plants such as water hyacinth to reduce the erosion of the banks, and which could then be fed to livestock. These also had the benefit of drawing out heavy metals from the water. They also practiced fish polyculture, where species like catfish, carps, and tilapia were farmed together, and thus were more effective in cleaning the water and protecting small fry from predators. Every year, the ponds were drained, and the sludge at the bottom was then applied to nearby fields, further reusing available nutrients.

Eventually, these farmers developed a system that, by 1995, provided 40-50% of Hanoi’s total fish supply every year. Scientific measurements showed that the water from the fish ponds, when pumped back into the river, was well below the World Health Organisation’s recommended level for biological oxygen demand—an indicator to determine the efficiency of water treatment systems. ⁵ Essentially, they had created a water treatment plant for a city of 1.5 million people, at almost no cost to the state.

A “low-cost folk technology” serving an entire city

You might be thinking: sure, this is one example of an interesting, but ultimately doomed, alternative to wastewater treatment. It is an aberration, and couldn’t possibly be maintained for long. Unfortunately for your internal cynic, it actually can be. The city of Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), India—population 14.8 million—has the largest sewage-fed aquaculture system in the world. Though farmers had been using sewage to feed fish in different ways since the 19th century, the system became more developed starting in the 1940s.

Image: Fish ponds in the East Kolkata Wetlands, the largest sewage-fed aquaculture system in the world today. Source: iStock.

During the British colonial period, administrators built a series of canals through the city that functioned as its sewers. These let out into the Bidyadhari River. However, this river quickly silted up and became unusable. As a result, an adjacent wetland area transformed from tidal salt marshes to primarily freshwater marshes. Two sewage canals were then built in 1940 to further extend the city’s effluent to the ocean. It was at this point that local farmers started rerouting the sewage water into fish ponds in the former salt marshes, growing vegetables on the banks of the sewage canals, and forming cooperatives to manage the wastewater.

Though the Kolkata system was developed over time, it is quite systematic. Every year, ponds are first drained and sludge is applied to fields. Sewage water is fed into the pond slowly at low depth and allowed to sit for two weeks. This basically mimics conventional sewage treatment systems, where sewage is first treated through stimulating algal and bacterial growth, harmful sediments are left to settle, and most parasites are killed because their eggs and worms die if they don’t find a host within two weeks. Then, fish are stocked in another pond, and slowly sewage water is introduced into the pond at a sewage-to-water ratio of 1:4. All of this requires skill and knowledge developed over generations, allowing farmers to know when oxygen levels are too low, which could kill the fish. ³ ⁶ The resulting effluent can reach the water quality of conventional treatment. ⁷

Image: A sluice gate made of bamboo at the Eastern Kolkata Wetlands. Water hyacinth is grown to help purify the water and to feed livestock. Source: Mukherjee, 2020. [^6]

Image: Every year, the ponds are drained, and the sludge at the bottom is applied to nearby fields, further reusing available nutrients. Source: [Take pride in the East Kolkata Wetlands](https://www.facebook.com/takeprideineastkolkatawetlands/) (Facebook-page).

Through trial and error and good judgement, local farmers have developed a wastewater treatment system that is extremely efficient and adaptive to local conditions. They can distinguish the kind of effluent—industrial or domestic—through the hues it gives off, and will control or dilute it when necessary. For example, sewage from tanneries can be toxic to fish, so they will not use it. They vary water levels according to season, weather, and available quantities of effluent. They know the hue of greenish-black the water needs to be to have an optimal oxygen and ammonia level for fish. They can tell whether there is too little oxygen by paying attention to the degree by which fish come up to the surface to gulp air. Farmers harvest snails in the water to protect fish growth, which are then crushed and fed to ducks, whose droppings in turn fertilize fish ponds and nearby soils. They plant water hyacinths and duckweed to absorb heavy metals from the sewage water. ⁷ ⁸

The Kolkata fish farms provide 40% of the region’s fish production and process 80% of the city’s sewage.

The Kolkata fish farms provide 8000 tons of fish per year to the city, or 40% of the region’s fish production. It processes 80% of the city’s sewage, and reduces the nutrient and organic loads of the city’s sewage water by 50-90%, while keeping bacterial loads to an acceptable level under WHO guidelines. It is calculated to save the city an equivalent of $64,400,000 per year in sewage treatment costs—making Kolkata an “ecologically subsidized city”. ⁹ The system provides farmers a return over investment of 28% and provides 200,000 people with a livelihood. ¹⁰

While profit shouldn’t itself be the goal of this system—it’s a public service, after all—it certainly helps to defray costs of wastewater treatment. In a small municipality in Karnal, northern India, one study showed that municipal sewage-fed fish ponds, installed in the 2010s, provided over $25,000 of net profit per year to the municipality, as well as indirect benefits such as improving nearby soils through the sale of treated wastewater to farmers. ¹¹

Image: Waste-fed fish ponds provide steady sources of protein for small-holder farmers. Source: [Fish Farming in the East Kolkata Wetlands, Ramble On, Priya Mallic](https://takeabookalong.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/fish-farming-in-the-east-kolkata-wetlands/).

Image: Fish harvested from the East Kolkata Wetlands. Source: [Fish Farming in the East Kolkata Wetlands, Ramble On, Priya Mallic](https://takeabookalong.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/fish-farming-in-the-east-kolkata-wetlands/).

Still, when introduced into small rural communities, the benefits extend far beyond monetary profit, to the social, cultural, and ecological services provided by the fish ponds. This includes improving soil quality, adaptability of local communities to climate change, leisure (e.g. fishing with friends), and steady sources of protein for small-holder farmers. For example, even if they don’t sell the fish, a small sewage-fed fish pond can provide a family of six with 8kg of fish, per person, per year—a significant raise in protein intake for many rural communities. ¹² In the case of the Eastern Kolkata Wetlands, the fish ponds also help to recharge the ground water—a serious issue in India where many aquifers are nearing depletion. ¹³

Kolkata’s wetlands are a “low-cost folk technology” ¹⁴ treating the majority of the sewage of a city with a population the size of New York. This is made possible through the development of a vast human-fish-plant ecosystem, a city-scale wastewater treatment plant that emerged through the creativity, ecological knowledge, and direction of local farming communities.

Over 90 systems in Germany in the early 20th century

By this point, your internal cynic might have come up with another counter-argument: sure, so it works at scale. But you would have to be pretty desperate, and poor, to stoop down to farming fish in sewage water. While it might work in India, and worked for a while in Vietnam and China, it would never work in developed countries, where there are higher sanitation standards, and where no one would want to eat the fish farmed in sewage anyway.

Image: A view of the former sewage-fed aquaculture system in Munich, Germany, today a bird sanctuary. Photo: Peter Schleypen, 2012. Source: [Historisches Lexikon Bayerns](https://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Abwasserbehandlung_(nach_1945))

You may be surprised to learn that, in fact, over 90 such systems existed in Germany in the early 20th century. ¹⁵ Up until the 1990s, the city of Munich still processed most of its wastewater through fish farming. Indeed, Germany has pioneered some of the more detailed and rigorous scientific investigation into the large-scale viability of sewage-fed fish ponds, as early as the 1890s.

Up until the 1990s, the city of Munich in Germany still processed most of its wastewater through fish farming.

Like in China, wastewater-fed fish ponds have a long but unappreciated history in Europe. Castle moats, monasteries, and villages often had wastewater-fed fish ponds. As cities grew rapidly in the 19th century, untreated wastewater was simply flushed into rivers, leading to the collapse of fisheries across Europe as well as generally unsanitary conditions and the spread of disease. There was a growing recognition that sewage should be treated; one common indicator of adequate treatment methods was that trout are able to live in the treated water. As a result, civil engineers and scientists constructed small fish ponds to test the quality of municipal sewage treatment plants.

Gustav Oesten, a civil engineer charged with wastewater treatment in Berlin, began to experiment in the late 1880s with using fish to treat wastewater, and to harvest fish as a secondary product of sewage treatment. He was able to spend the good part of a decade conducting experiments with different fish species, designs for ponds, and various local and weather conditions. ¹⁵

Image: Feed channel for the fish ponds of the Munich sewage-fed aquaculture system. Image by Bjs (CC BY-SA 3.0), Wikimedia Commons.

Through these experiments, he showed conclusively that fish growth accelerates in sewage water, and that fish in turn help purify sewage water. Trout were not very good fish for this purpose, because they cannot tolerate water with high oxygen levels—common in wastewater systems, a byproduct of rapid algae growth. Carp, who can come up for air when oxygen levels are intolerable, grew very well—those fed with sewage far exceeding production of those in normal fish ponds. But, using trout, he proved that the water was of high enough quality to enter back into the water shed. His experiments suggested that fish ponds could be designed to help address Europe’s water crisis and, at the same time, provide an economic return through the sale of fish.

By the beginning of the 20th century scientists throughout Germany started conducting more small-scale experiments. Bruno Hofer, a fish scientist better known for pioneering the study of fish pathologies, started scaling up these experiments, showing in the early 1900s that wastewater of larger institutions like hospitals, breweries, and factories, as well as smaller municipalities could theoretically be treated with fish ponds. He even went further, and “dared” to propose such a system for a city as large as Munich—a notion that was perhaps considered outlandish at the time.

Image: A sprinkler introducing secondary treated wastewater diluted with river water into a wastewater-fed fishpond in Munich, Germany. Source: Edwards, 2005. [^15]

By 1929, however, after several successful implementations of Hofer’s design around Germany, the city of Munich built its own fish pond wastewater treatment system, which served the whole city until the 1990s. This was the largest such system implemented at the time in the world, initially designed to process the wastewater of 500,000 people. The system was so efficient that the water leaving the ponds, fully treated, was comparable to natural water in quality and nutrient level. ¹⁶

Many applications

As these examples illustrate, sewage-fed aquaculture is a solution to many interlinked problems. It processes waste—from agriculture, livestock, and cities—and cycles those nutrients back into the system through food and agricultural production. It reduces nitrogen and phosphorous levels in the water, preventing eutrophication further downstream. It reuses available water, slowing down the water cycle and replenishing groundwater. It further reduces unnecessary inputs like chemical fertilizers, phosphates, and energy-intensive fish feed. Finally, it creates jobs and a source of income, especially necessary in poor countries.

If we were to calculate the fertilizer potential of sewage water alone, this would be reason enough to develop systems to reuse it. For example, one study estimated that, in the year 2000, all of India’s sewage was worth an equivalent of $2,000,000 per day in fertilizer costs. ¹⁷ In other words, on any given day, all of India is flushing several million dollars down the toilet. Waste-fed fish ponds would be of great help in capturing this wealth. Perhaps counter-intuitively, scientists have found that waste-fed fish ponds may actually be especially useful for arid countries, where water is scarce, by re-using wastewater for protein production. ¹⁸ Fish ponds don’t have to be for productive use alone. They can be integrated into wetlands and conservation areas, leisure fishing, tourism areas, or educational sites. They provide opportunities for improving biodiversity and making urban life more permeable for nature.

Fish ponds don’t have to be for productive use alone. They can be integrated into wetlands and conservation areas, leisure fishing, tourism areas, or educational sites.

Another reason waste-fed fish ponds continue to be relevant is that it is low-cost and low-tech, and therefore has little barriers for implementation. While high-tech, high-input systems like hydroponics, vertical gardening, and automated agriculture are getting a lot of press these days, the fact is that the majority of the world’s farmers have little to no access to capital and relies on small, but mostly sustainable, interventions to feed a stunning 70% of the global population. ¹⁹ Waste-fed fish ponds offer a source of subsistence at little financial risk to these small farmers. ⁸ Equally, when developed at the municipal level, they offer small towns, villages, and resource-poor communities opportunities to defray the costs of wastewater treatment, as well as generating local employment and improving sanitation. ¹¹ ¹²

Why don’t we do this more often?

Despite many advantages, most sewage-fed aquaculture systems have either been totally stopped or are in decline. So what happened? The first possible reason, and the one that most people might raise, is the “yuck factor”. Perhaps it’s just too gross for most people to eat fish grown from poop. By and large, this wasn’t the problem: consumers’ surprising acceptance of waste-fed fish is a constant in the research on urban fish ponds. ²⁰ Furthermore, about 10% of the world’s population probably already consumes food irrigated with wastewater ²¹, and, even in the European Union, where agricultural regulations are famously strict, many farmers already apply sewage sludge to their fields—but European consumers don’t seem to care too much.

Image: Tilapia.

Image: Vietnamese catfish.

Image: Common carp.

The second possible reason for their decline is that it’s not safe. And, it’s true, here is where the most care needs to be taken in designing effective wastewater treatment. There is good evidence showing that sewage treatment in fish ponds can be as safe as conventional methods. Some of the strongest evidence to support this comes from a city-sized experiment conducted in the 1980s in Lima, Peru, sponsored by the World Bank and the United Nations Development Project. Aid agencies worked closely together with the city government to design a large-scale aquaponic sewage treatment site. ²²

The site was basically a city-sized proof-of-concept. Endless measurements were taken over its two decades of operation, adjusting different variables throughout the project’s lifespan, and controlling for changes in volume of sewage and weather. It was found quite conclusively that fish-based sewage treatment was not only a viable and economical alternative for low-income countries, it also met stringent World Health Organization guidelines for water sanitation. The fish were also tested for human consumption. In all three trials, 100% of fish tested were rated at “very good” in safety levels. ²³ This study wasn’t alone: numerous studies have investigated the safety of fish grown in sewage ponds. ²⁴

More than just a leaking sink

If it’s not the “yuck factor” or safety, then what was it? In Hanoi, the waste-fed fishponds were not fully recognized for their potential, and peri-urban development in the 1990s began to encroach on the fish ponds. As the communist era came to an end, land near the city became increasingly valuable, and ponds were filled up for housing construction. Sewage became mixed with untreated industrial effluent, leading to large amounts of sewage being poisonous to fish, in turn leading farmers to switch to pelleted feed, by then increasingly available as Vietnam’s domestic market was opened to foreign trade.²⁵ ²⁶ Today, Hanoi only treats 22% of its sewage, the rest flows directly into its river systems, and 180,000 cubic meters of waste water are discharged every day into the To Lich river, the same river that serviced the fish ponds. ²⁷ ²⁸

The disappearance of fish ponds in Germany can also be largely attributed to urban growth. As cities grew, peri-urban areas—where fish ponds necessarily needed to be placed due to them having to be close to sewage lines and sources of fresh water—became more valuable. Pressured by booming real estate prices, less availability of land, high costs of labour, as well as diminishing returns on investment as domestic fish breeding had to compete with international markets, governments inevitably chose to close the fish ponds, or convert them into more conventional sewage treatment plants. Even in Munich, the largest system built in Germany, management was costly and became less and less appealing to the municipality. Munich’s fish ponds were eventually converted into a nature reserve, where migrating birds come to rest. Fish production is no longer its primary goal, and the estuary only absorbs a small percentage of Munich’s wastewater. ¹⁵

Image: The East Kolkata Wetlands in 2005. Source: Google Earth.

Image: The East Kolkata Wetlands in 2019. Source: Google Earth.

The system at Kolkata is still operational, but suffering from similar symptoms. At their peak, fish ponds in the East Kolkata Wetlands were as large as 12,000 hectares. This has shrunk to 4,000 hectares due to encroaching urban development. In Kolkata, too, workers struggle to deal with industrial effluent such as that from the sizeable leather tanning industry, which is poisonous to the fish and indiscriminately dumped into the municipal wastewater system. ⁶ ¹⁰ ²⁹ ³⁰ Thankfully, unlike Hanoi’s government, the city of Kolkata and the Indian government recognized the importance of this system, and put in a series of regulations to protect it from further development. Still, informal and illegal development—where developers fill up ponds with debris overnight and then build on it as farmers are forced to abandon it—is slowly chipping away at the wetlands.

So the main driver of their disappearance is urban expansion into the peripheries. This is largely due to the global speculation on real estate—which constitutes 60% of all capital investments today. ³¹ When given a choice between selling peri-urban land to the highest bidder, and pairing sewage treatment with some fish production, most officials won’t think twice—the fish ponds have got to go! A second reason is the high prevalence of toxic chemicals in our water systems—which are too concentrated for ecosystems, and aquaculture systems, to absorb. We should ask ourselves if it’s really worth it to permit these products if they make it harder for us to mend the ecological rift between our settlements and their surroundings.

More messy, organic systems are often derided as backwards and primitive, when in fact they may be far more appropriate and sustainable than the energy-intensive, easily replicable “solutions” valued by planners and engineers.

A third reason is the relatively cheap cost of fossil fuels. In most industrialized countries, it is much more rational to choose for sewage treatment plans with a small land footprint but a large carbon footprint. In a world where energy is cheap, environmental costs can be pushed further and further downstream. But they will eventually circle back to us, and already are. Finally, a significant factor, and one which we shouldn’t ignore, is the bias of our leaders and of professional engineers against more messy, organic systems like that of wastewater-fed aquaculture. Such low-tech solutions are often derided in popular culture as backwards and primitive, when in fact they may be far more appropriate and sustainable than the energy-intensive, easily replicable “solutions” valued by planners and engineers. ³²

Each reason points to a deeper problem: our economy’s inability to value the right things. Like so many sustainable solutions today, and many of those discussed on this website, sewage-fed fish ponds suffer from the “you can’t change this one thing without changing the whole system” problem. These systems are beset by global real estate speculation, toxic chemicals in our food and household products, contamination by industry, the cheap price of fuel, and the deep-seated idea that humans are separate from the ecosystems they are embedded in. At the root of it all is a system of value that is not in line with our ecological needs as a species, and as a member of Earth’s living community.

Fish ponds are a low-tech, low-cost, safe, and sustainable way to fix our society’s leaking sink. But when we get down there on our hands and knees, we might find a lot of other things that need fixing.

Aaron Vansintjan

Thank you to Henning Fehr for doing research on the fish pond system in Germany, Michael DiGregorio for telling me about the Vietnamese system, Phuong Anh Nguyen for the extra research into it, and Geert Vansintjan for always keeping me inspired.

For example, in many developed countries, sewage treatment often involves constant automated stirring of large ponds of water—a system which is hard to maintain and takes a lot of energy. While sewage treatment only accounts for 4% of national energy use in the US, they account for up to 50% of municipal energy use—a significant portion of the domestic energy footprint. That means that towns and cities could actually decrease their energy impacts significantly if they switched to different treatment plants. See https://betterbuildingssolutioncenter.energy.gov/sites/default/files/Primer%20on%20energy%20efficiency%20in%20water%20and%20wastewater%20plants_0.pdf ↩︎
It also contributes to a little-understood phenomenon called coastal darkening, where our ocean floors become muddier and darker, leading to a lower albedo, or reflectivity, of the Earth’s surface, in turn triggering global heating as well as reduced ability for marine life to receive daylight. https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/the-environmental-threat-youve-never-heard-of/ ↩︎
Edwards, P. (2003) Philosophy, principles and concepts of integrated agri-aquaculture systems. In: Gooley, G. J., & Gavine, F. M. (Eds.), Integrated agri-aquaculture systems: a resource handbook for Australian industry development. Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Edwards, P. (2015). Aquaculture environment interactions: past, present and likely future trends. Aquaculture, 447, 2-14. ↩︎
Edwards, P. (1996). Wastewater reuse in aquaculture: Socially and environmentally appropriate wastewater treatment for Vietnam. The ICLARM Quarterly, January. ↩︎
Mukherjee, J. (2020). Blue Infrastructures. Springer Singapore. ↩︎ ↩︎
Ho, L., & Goethals, P. L. (2020). Municipal wastewater treatment with pond technology: Historical review and future outlook. Ecological Engineering, 148, 105791. ↩︎ ↩︎
Edwards, P. (2009). Traditional asian aquaculture. In New Technologies in Aquaculture (pp. 1029-1063). Woodhead Publishing. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
A term attributed to Dhrubajyoti Ghosh, a high-profile activist for the Eastern Kolkata Wetlands. ↩︎
Banerjee, S., & Dey, D. (2017). Eco-system complementarities and urban encroachment: A SWOT analysis of the East Kolkata Wetlands, India. Cities and the Environment (CATE), 10(1), 2. ↩︎ ↩︎
Kumar, D., Chaturvedi, M.K., Sharma, S.K. and Asolekar, S.R., 2015. Sewage-fed aquaculture: a sustainable approach for wastewater treatment and reuse. Environmental monitoring and assessment, 187(10), pp.1-10. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Lightfoot, C., Bimbao, M.A.P., Dalsgaard, J.P.T. and Pullin, R.S., 1993. Aquaculture and sustainability through integrated resources management. Outlook on Agriculture, 22(3), pp.143-150. ↩︎ ↩︎
Datta, S. (2006). Waste Water Management Through Aquaculture. Journal of Environmental Management. 1. 339-350. ↩︎
Mukherjee, J. (2020) citing Dhrubajyoti Ghosh. ↩︎
Prein, M. (1988, December). Wastewater-fed fish culture in Germany. In Edwards, P. and Pullin, RSV Wastewater-Fed Aquaculture. Proceedings of the Internation al Seminar on Wastewater reclamation and Reuse for Aquaculture, Calcut ta, India (pp. 6-9). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
One issue with the fish ponds in the German case was the high variability of the weather. Less sun in the Fall and Spring meant that algal production was much lower, in turn impacting fish growth and the ability of the system to treat wastewater at constant rates. In the winter months, ponds will often freeze, leading to oxygen deficiencies and fish deaths. As solar radiation can fluctuate throughout the day, the fish ponds require daily management to balance fish growth, algal growth, nutrient removal, and too much sewage that would lead to fish deaths. ↩︎
Calculated using the Indian Rupee to US Dollar exchange rate in 2000, adjusted by the author for inflation of USD in 2021 from data provided by Jana, B. B., Heeb, J., & Das, S. (2018). Ecosystem Resilient Driven Remediation for Safe and Sustainable Reuse of Municipal Wastewater. In Wastewater management through aquaculture (pp. 163-183). Springer, Singapore. ↩︎
In Israel, for example, mid-century kibbutzim colonies, which were often limited in the groundwater available to them, experimented in the 1960s with reusing sewage for fish production.In Egypt, the government has put its hope in wastewater-fed aquaculture, in an attempt to increase domestic protein production and maximize use of water. ³ ¹⁹ See also Kolkovsky, S., Hulata, G., Simon, Y., Segev, R., & Koren, A. (2003). Integration of agri-aquaculture systems the Israeli experience. In: Gooley, G. J., & Gavine, F. M. (Eds.), Integrated agri-aquaculture systems: a resource handbook for Australian industry development. Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation. ↩︎
El-Zohri, M., Hifney, A. F., Ramadan, T., & Abdel-Basset, R. (2014). Use of Sewage in Agriculture and Related Activities. In: Pessarakli, M. (Ed.), Handbook of plant and crop physiology. CRC Press. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
In Germany in the 20th century, consumers at first rejected these fish, but municipalities engaged in public communication campaigns to convince people otherwise. ¹⁵ In Lima, Peru, researchers conducted a study of whether the fish were accepted by consumers at the market, and were surprised to find out that people weren’t so bothered when they found out where the fish came from. ²¹ In Kolkata, too, sewage-fed fish still constitute 40% of the local fish market, even when consumers have alternatives available. ↩︎
WHO (2015) Sanitation. Fact sheet no. 392. World Health Organization, Geneva ↩︎ ↩︎
Cointreau, S. J. (1990). Aquaculture with treated wastewater: A status Report on studies conducted in Lima, Peru. Applied Research and Technology (WUDAT), Technical Note No. 3. The World Bank Water Supply and Urban Development Department: p. 1-56. ↩︎
In a fourth trial, only 6% were rated as “unacceptable”, but this was because they deliberately increased the ratio of sewage-to-water above the acceptable level, to mimic an “accident”. Still, these same fish were then rated as “very good” when the sewage level was decreased for a subsequent 30 days. This shows that even in the case of an accident, fish can easily recover to being safe for consumption. See UNEP International Environmental Technology Centre. (2002). Environmentally Sound Technologies for Wastewater and Stormwater Management: an International Source Book (Vol. 15). International Water Assn. ↩︎
Where there are insufficient resources to build sanitary requirements into the system, researchers recommend that cleaning, butchering, and packaging be done in sanitary conditions, so that fish muscle does not risk being contaminated with pathogens on the skin or in intestines. Cooking fish thoroughly is also recommended—and in Kolkata, local cuisine fortunately does not include raw fish. Another proposal is to transfer fish to clean water ponds two weeks before harvest; this both reduces the risk of pathogens being present in fish muscle and intestines, and helps to eliminate possible unpleasant odours. Edwards P. (1990) Reuse of human excreta in aquaculture: A state-of-the-art review. Draft Report. World Bank, Washington DC. And when it comes to the presence of toxic chemicals, there is also good evidence to show that this is not a significant problem. However, this does depend on local conditions. For example, people in industrialized countries use many more detergents and pharmaceuticals that may impact the fish. This includes a broad category of toxins called “emerging contaminants” which are found in new products like beauty products and certain pharmaceuticals. There have been little recent studies in industrialized countries on the effects of these products on sewage-fed fish—in large part because these systems had largely been phased out by the time these household commodities became more prevalent in the last fifty years. ³ ⁸ ¹¹ ¹⁹ ²⁹ ³⁰ ³² ↩︎
Edwards, P. (2004). Decline of wastewater-fed aquaculture in Hanoi. Aquaculture Asia, Volume IX (4, October-December): 13-14. ↩︎
Hoan, V. Q., & Edwards, P. (2005). Wastewater reuse through urban aquaculture in Hanoi, Vietnam: status and prospects. Urban aquaculture. CABI International, Wallingford, 103-117. ↩︎
Saigoneer (2019). Only 13% of Vietnam’s Urban Sewage Is Treated Before Discharge. The Saigoneer. https://www.saigoneer.com/saigon-environment/17571-only-13-of-vietnam-s-urban-sewage-is-treated-before-discharge ↩︎
Kiet, Anh. (2019). No technology can radically clean Hanoi’s polluted river if sewage not treated: Mayor. Hanoi News. http://hanoitimes.vn/no-technology-can-clean-hanois-heavily-polluted-river-if-people-keep-pouring-sewage-into-it-mayor-300420.html ↩︎
Bunting, S. W. (2007). Confronting the realities of wastewater aquaculture in peri-urban Kolkata with bioeconomic modelling. Water Research, 41(2), 499-505. ↩︎ ↩︎
Jana, B. B. (1998). Sewage-fed aquaculture: the Calcutta model. Ecological Engineering, 11(1-4), 73-85. ↩︎ ↩︎
Stein, S. (2019). Capital city: Gentrification and the real estate state. Verso Books. ↩︎
Mara, D. (2013). Domestic wastewater treatment in developing countries. Routledge. ↩︎ ↩︎

Vertical Farming Does not Save Space

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Urban agriculture in vertical, indoor “farms” is on the rise. Electric lights allow the crops to be grown in layers above each other year-round. Proponents argue that growers can save a lot of agricultural land in this way. Additional advantages are that less energy is needed to transport food (most people live in a city) and that less water and pesticides are required.

Which crops?

The vertical farms that have been commercially active for several years all focus on the same crops. These are agricultural products with a high water content, such as lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and herbs. However, these are not crops that can feed a city. They contain hardly any carbohydrates, proteins, or fats. To feed a city, it takes grains, legumes, root crops, and oil crops. These are now grown globally on 16 million square kilometers of farmland - almost the size of South America. ¹

Growing wheat vertically

An art installation currently presented in Brussels - The Farm - explores what it would take to grow wheat in a vertical farm. For the experiment, 1 square meter of wheat was sown in a completely artificial environment. By measuring the input of raw materials such as energy and water, the project shows the extent to which natural ecosystems support our food production. When wheat is planted in the ground next to each other, instead of above, the sun provides free energy and the clouds free water.

A loaf of bread for 345 euros

The experiment shows that growing 1m2 of wheat in an artificial environment costs 2,577 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 394 liters of water per year. The energy required for the hardware production (such as lighting) is not included in these results, so this is an underestimate. The building’s energy cost is also not taken into account, and that concerns both the construction and its use, for example, for heating, cooling and pumping water.

The cost calculation does include the price of the equipment (1,227 euros). The lifespan of the infrastructure is estimated at 8 years. Converted, the production of 1 m2 of wheat in an artificial environment costs 610 euros per square meter per year (including infrastructure, electricity, and water). Of this, 412 euros goes to electricity consumption and only 1 euro to water consumption. This calculation may be an overestimate because the installation is set up in an exhibition space.

The “farm” produces four harvests per year. With every harvest, enough wheat is grown to make one loaf of bread (580 grams), which has a cost of at least 345 euros. Each loaf contains 2,000 kilocalories, the amount that an average person needs per day. As a result, 91 m2 of artificially produced wheat is necessary for each person, with a total cost of 125,680 euros per year.

The paradox of vertical farming

Artificial lighting saves land because plants can be grown above each other, but if the electricity for the lighting comes from solar panels, then the savings are canceled out by the land required to install the solar panels. The vertical farm is a paradox unless fossil fuels provide the energy. ² In that case, there’s not much sustainable about it.

Calculated at a yield of 175 kilowatt-hours per square meter of solar panel per year, the indoor cultivation of 1 m2 of wheat requires 20 m2 of solar panels. This is a underestimate because the calculations are based on the average yield of a solar panel. There is much less sunlight in winter than in summer. In reality, the vertical farm requires many more solar panels to keep operating all year round. There is also a need for an energy storage infrastructure, which costs money and energy too. Finally, solar panels’ production also requires energy, which would demand even more space if the production process itself were to run on solar panels.

Innovation?

All this criticism also applies to vertical farms where lettuce and tomatoes are grown. In this case, there is a significant reduction in water use. These companies are profitable, but only because the process relies on a supply of cheap fossil fuels. If solar panels supplied the energy, the extra costs and space for the energy supply would again cancel out the savings in terms of space and costs. The only advantage of a vertical farm would then be the shorter transport distances. Still, we could just as well make transport between town and countryside more sustainable.

The problem with agriculture is not that it happens in the countryside. The problem is that it relies heavily on fossil fuels. The vertical farm is not the solution since it replaces, once again, the free and renewable energy from the sun with expensive technology that is dependent on fossil fuels (LED lamps + computers + concrete buildings + solar panels). Our lifestyle is becoming less and less sustainable, increasingly dependent on raw materials, infrastructure, machines, and fossil energy. Unfortunately, this also applies to almost all technology that we nowadays label sustainable.

More info: Solar Share (The Farm), by Disnovation.org (Maria Roszkowska, Nicolas Maigret) and Baruch Gottlieb.

Smil, Vaclav. “It’ll be harder than we thought to get the carbon out [Blueprints for a Miracle].” IEEE Spectrum 55.6 (2018): 72-75. ↩︎
Atomic power and wind turbines are other options. See the comments. ↩︎

How to Make Biomass Energy Sustainable Again

Sun, 20 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Image: Pollarded trees in Germany. Image: René Schröder (CC BY-SA 4.0).

How is Cutting Down Trees Sustainable?

Advocating for the use of biomass as a renewable source of energy – replacing fossil fuels – has become controversial among environmentalists. The comments on the previous article, which discussed thermoelectric stoves, illustrate this:

“As the recent film Planet of the Humans points out, biomass a.k.a. dead trees is not a renewable resource by any means, even though the EU classifies it as such.”
“How is cutting down trees sustainable?”
“Article fails to mention that a wood stove produces more CO2 than a coal power plant for every ton of wood/coal that is burned.”
“This is pure insanity. Burning trees to reduce our carbon footprint is oxymoronic.”
“The carbon footprint alone is just horrifying.”
“The biggest problem with burning anything is once it’s burned, it’s gone forever.”
“The only silly question I can add to to the silliness of this piece, is where is all the wood coming from?”

In contrast to what the comments suggest, the article does not advocate the expansion of biomass as an energy source. Instead, it argues that already burning biomass fires – used by roughly 40% of today’s global population – could also produce electricity as a by-product, if they are outfitted with thermoelectric modules. Nevertheless, several commenters maintained their criticism after they read the article more carefully. One of them wrote: “We should aim to eliminate the burning of biomass globally, not make it more attractive.”

Apparently, high-tech thinking has permeated the minds of (urban) environmentalists to such an extent that they view biomass as an inherently troublesome energy source – similar to fossil fuels. To be clear, critics are right to call out unsustainable practices in biomass production. However, these are the consequences of a relatively recent, “industrial” approach to forestry. When we look at historical forest management practices, it becomes clear that biomass is potentially one of the most sustainable energy sources on this planet.

Coppicing: Harvesting Wood Without Killing Trees

Nowadays, most wood is harvested by killing trees. Before the Industrial Revolution, a lot of wood was harvested from living trees, which were coppiced. The principle of coppicing is based on the natural ability of many broad-leaved species to regrow from damaged stems or roots – damage caused by fire, wind, snow, animals, pathogens, or (on slopes) falling rocks. Coppice management involves the cutting down of trees close to ground level, after which the base – called the “stool” – develops several new shoots, resulting in a multi-stemmed tree.

Image: A coppice stool. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

Image: A recently coppiced patch of oak forest. Credit: Henk vD. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Image: Coppice stools in Surrey, England. Credit: Martinvl (CC BY-SA 4.0)

When we think of a forest or a tree plantation, we imagine it as a landscape stacked with tall trees. However, until the beginning of the twentieth century, at least half of the forests in Europe were coppiced, giving them a more bush-like appearance. ¹ The coppicing of trees can be dated back to the stone age, when people built pile dwellings and trackways crossing prehistoric fenlands using thousands of branches of equal size – a feat that can only be accomplished by coppicing. ²

Maps: The approximate historical range of coppice forests in the Czech Republic (above) and in Spain (below). Source: \"Coppice forests in Europe\", see [^1]

Ever since then, the technique formed the standard approach to wood production – not just in Europe but almost all over the world. Coppicing expanded greatly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when population growth and the rise of industrial activity (glass, iron, tile and lime manufacturing) put increasing pressure on wood reserves.

Short Rotation Cycles

Because the young shoots of a coppiced tree can exploit an already well-developed root system, a coppiced tree produces wood faster than a tall tree. Or, to be more precise: although its photosynthetic efficiency is the same, a tall tree provides more biomass below ground (in the roots) while a coppiced tree produces more biomass above ground (in the shoots) – which is clearly more practical for harvesting. ³ Partly because of this, coppicing was based on short rotation cycles, often of around two to four years, although both yearly rotations and rotations up to 12 years or longer also occurred.

Images: Coppice stools with different rotation cycles. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

Because of the short rotation cycles, a coppice forest was a very quick, regular and reliable supplier of firewood. Often, it was cut up into a number of equal compartments that corresponded to the number of years in the planned rotation. For example, if the shoots were harvested every three years, the forest was divided into three parts, and one of these was coppiced each year. Short rotation cycles also meant that it took only a few years before the carbon released by the burning of the wood was compensated by the carbon that was absorbed by new growth, making a coppice forest truly carbon neutral. In very short rotation cycles, new growth could even be ready for harvest by the time the old growth wood had dried enough to be burned.

In some tree species, the stump sprouting ability decreases with age. After several rotations, these trees were either harvested in their entirety and replaced by new trees, or converted into a coppice with a longer rotation. Other tree species resprout well from stumps of all ages, and can provide shoots for centuries, especially on rich soils with a good water supply. Surviving coppice stools can be more than 1,000 years old.

Biodiversity

A coppice can be called a “coppice forest” or a “coppice plantation”, but in reality it was neither a forest nor a plantation – perhaps something in between. Although managed by humans, coppice forests were not environmentally destructive, on the contrary. Harvesting wood from living trees instead of killing them is beneficial for the life forms that depend on them. Coppice forests can have a richer biodiversity than unmanaged forests, because they always contain areas with different stages of light and growth. None of this is true in industrial wood plantations, which support little or no plant and animal life, and which have longer rotation cycles (of at least twenty years).

Image: Coppice stools in the Netherlands. Credit: K. Vliet (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Image: Sweet chestnut coppice at Flexham Park, Sussex, England. Credit: Charlesdrakew, public domain.

Our forebears also cut down tall, standing trees with large-diameter stems – just not for firewood. Large trees were only “killed” when large timber was required, for example for the construction of ships, buildings, bridges, and windmills. ⁴ Coppice forests could contain tall trees (a “coppice-with-standards”), which were left to grow for decades while the surrounding trees were regularly pruned. However, even these standing trees could be partly coppiced, for example by harvesting their side branches while they were alive (shredding).

Multipurpose Trees

The archetypical wood plantation promoted by the industrial world involves regularly spaced rows of trees in even-aged, monocultural stands, providing a single output – timber for construction, pulpwood for paper production, or fuelwood for power plants. In contrast, trees in pre-industrial coppice forests had multiple purposes. They provided firewood, but also construction materials and animal fodder.

The targeted wood dimensions, determined by the use of the shoots, set the rotation period of the coppice. Because not every type of wood was suited for every type of use, coppiced forests often consisted of a variety of tree species at different ages. Several age classes of stems could even be rotated on the same coppice stool (“selection coppice”), and the rotations could evolve over time according to the needs and priorities of the economic activities.

Image: A small woodland with a diverse mix of coppiced, pollarded and standard trees. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

Coppiced wood was used to build almost anything that was needed in a community. ⁵ For example, young willow shoots, which are very flexible, were braided into baskets and crates, while sweet chestnut prunings, which do not expand or shrink after drying, were used to make all kinds of barrels. Ash and goat willow, which yield straight and sturdy wood, provided the material for making the handles of brooms, axes, shovels, rakes and other tools.

Young hazel shoots were split along the entire length, braided between the wooden beams of buildings, and then sealed with loam and cow manure – the so-called wattle-and-daub construction. Hazel shoots also kept thatched roofs together. Alder and willow, which have almost limitless life expectancy under water, were used as foundation piles and river bank reinforcements. The construction wood that was taken out of a coppice forest did not diminish its energy supply: because the artefacts were often used locally, at the end of their lives they could still be burned as firewood.

Image: Harvesting leaf fodder in Leikanger kommune, Norway. Credit: Leif Hauge. Source: [^19]

Coppice forests also supplied food. On the one hand, they provided people with fruits, berries, truffles, nuts, mushrooms, herbs, honey, and game. On the other hand, they were an important source of winter fodder for farm animals. Before the Industrial Revolution, many sheep and goats were fed with so-called “leaf fodder” or “leaf hay” – leaves with or without twigs. ⁶

Elm and ash were among the most nutritious species, but sheep also got birch, hazel, linden, bird cherry and even oak, while goats were also fed with alder. In mountainous regions, horses, cattle, pigs and silk worms could be given leaf hay too. Leaf fodder was grown in rotations of three to six years, when the branches provided the highest ratio of leaves to wood. When the leaves were eaten by the animals, the wood could still be burned.

Pollards & Hedgerows

Coppice stools are vulnerable to grazing animals, especially when the shoots are young. Therefore, coppice forests were usually protected against animals by building a ditch, fence or hedge around them. In contrast, pollarding allowed animals and trees to be mixed on the same land. Pollarded trees were pruned like coppices, but to a height of at least two metres to keep the young shoots out of reach of grazing animals.

Illustration: Different ways of lopping trees. Credit: Helen J. Read, see [^1]

Image: Pollarded trees in Segovia, Spain. Credit: [Ecologistas en Acción](https://www.ecologistasenaccion.org/35724/).

Wooded meadows and wood pastures – mosaics of pasture and forest – combined the grazing of animals with the production of fodder, firewood and/or construction wood from pollarded trees. “Pannage” or “mast feeding” was the method of sending pigs into pollarded oak forests during autumn, where they could feed on fallen acorns. The system formed the mainstay of pork production in Europe for centuries. ⁷ The “meadow orchard” or “grazed orchard” combined fruit cultivation and grazing – pollarded fruit trees offered shade to the animals, while the animals could not reach the fruit but fertilised the trees.

Image: Forest or pasture? Something in between. A \"dehesa\" (pig forest farm) in Spain. Credit: Basotxerri (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Image: Cattle grazes among pollarded trees in Huelva, Spain. (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Image: A meadow orchard surrounded by a living hedge in Rijkhoven, Belgium. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

While agriculture and forestry are now strictly separated activities, in earlier times the farm was the forest and vice versa. It would make a lot of sense to bring them back together, because agriculture and livestock production – not wood production – are the main drivers of deforestation. If trees provide animal fodder, meat and dairy production should not lead to deforestation. If crops can be grown in fields with trees, agriculture should not lead to deforestation. Forest farms would also improve animal welfare, soil fertility and erosion control.

Line Plantings

Extensive plantations could consist of coppiced or pollarded trees, and were often managed as a commons. However, coppicing and pollarding were not techniques seen only in large-scale forest management. Small woodlands in between fields or next to a rural house and managed by an individual household would be coppiced or pollarded. A lot of wood was also grown as line plantings around farmyards, fields and meadows, near buildings, and along paths, roads and waterways. Here, lopped trees and shrubs could also appear in the form of hedgerows, thickly planted hedges. ⁸

Image: Hedge landscape in Normandy, France, around 1940. Credit: W Wolny, public domain.

Image: Line plantings in Flanders, Belgium. Detail from the Ferraris map, 1771-78.

Although line plantings are usually associated with the use of hedgerows in England, they were common in large parts of Europe. In 1804, English historian Abbé Mann expressed his surprise when he wrote about his trip to Flanders (today part of Belgium): “All fields are enclosed with hedges, and thick set with trees, insomuch that the whole face of the country, seen from a little height, seems one continued wood”. Typical for the region was the large number of pollarded trees. ⁸

Like coppice forests, line plantings were diverse and provided people with firewood, construction materials and leaf fodder. However, unlike coppice forests, they had extra functions because of their specific location. ⁹ One of these was plot separation: keeping farm animals in, and keeping wild animals or cattle grazing on common lands out. Various techniques existed to make hedgerows impenetrable, even for small animals such as rabbits. Around meadows, hedgerows or rows of very closely planted pollarded trees (“pollarded tree hedges”) could stop large animals such as cows. If willow wicker was braided between them, such a line planting could also keep small animals out. ⁸

Image: Detail of a yew hedge. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

Image: A hedgerow. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

Image: Pollarded tree hedge in Nieuwekerken, Belgium. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

Image: Coppice stools in a pasture. Credit: Jan Bastiaens.

Trees and line plantings also offered protection against the weather. Line plantings protected fields, orchards and vegetable gardens against the wind, which could erode the soil and damage the crops. In warmer climates, trees could shield crops from the sun and fertilize the soil. Pollarded lime trees, which have very dense foliage, were often planted right next to wattle-and-daub buildings in order to protect them from wind, rain and sun. ¹⁰

Dunghills were protected by one or more trees, preventing the valuable resource from evaporating due to sun or wind. In the yard of a watermill, the wooden water wheel was shielded by a tree to prevent the wood from shrinking or expanding in times of drought or inactivity. ⁸

Image: A pollarded tree protects a water wheel. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

Image: Pollarded lime trees protect a farm building in Nederbrakel, Belgium. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

Location Matters

Along paths, roads and waterways, line plantings had many of the same location-specific functions as on farms. Cattle and pigs were hoarded over dedicated droveways lined with hedgerows, coppices and/or pollards. When the railroads appeared, line plantings prevented collisions with animals. They protected road travellers from the weather, and marked the route so that people and animals would not get off the road in a snowy landscape. They prevented soil erosion at riverbanks and hollow roads.

All functions of line plantings could be managed by dead wood fences, which can be moved more easily than hedgerows, take up less space, don’t compete for light and food with crops, and can be ready in a short time. ¹¹ However, in times and places were wood was scarce a living hedge was often preferred (and sometimes obliged) because it was a continuous wood producer, while a dead wood fence was a continuous wood consumer. A dead wood fence may save space and time on the spot, but it implies that the wood for its construction and maintenance is grown and harvested elsewhere in the surroundings.

Image: Pollarded tree hedge in Belgium. Credit: Geert Van der Linden.

Local use of wood resources was maximised. For example, the tree that was planted next to the waterwheel, was not just any tree. It was red dogwood or elm, the wood that was best suited for constructing the interior gearwork of the mill. When a new part was needed for repairs, the wood could be harvested right next to the mill. Likewise, line plantings along dirt roads were used for the maintenance of those roads. The shoots were tied together in bundles and used as a foundation or to fill up holes. Because the trees were coppiced or pollarded and not cut down, no function was ever at the expense of another.

Nowadays, when people advocate for the planting of trees, targets are set in terms of forested area or the number of trees, and little attention is given to their location – which could even be on the other side of the world. However, as these examples show, planting trees closeby and in the right location can significantly optimise their potential.

Shaped by Limits

Coppicing has largely disappeared in industrial societies, although pollarded trees can still be found along streets and in parks. Their prunings, which once sustained entire communities, are now considered waste products. If it worked so well, why was coppicing abandoned as a source of energy, materials and food? The answer is short: fossil fuels. Our forebears relied on coppice because they had no access to fossil fuels, and we don’t rely on coppice because we have.

Our forebears relied on coppice because they had no access to fossil fuels, and we don’t rely on coppice because we have

Most obviously, fossil fuels have replaced wood as a source of energy and materials. Coal, gas and oil took the place of firewood for cooking, space heating, water heating and industrial processes based on thermal energy. Metal, concrete and brick – materials that had been around for many centuries – only became widespread alternatives to wood after they could be made with fossil fuels, which also brought us plastics. Artificial fertilizers – products of fossil fuels – boosted the supply and the global trade of animal fodder, making leaf fodder obsolete. The mechanisation of agriculture – driven by fossil fuels – led to farming on much larger plots along with the elimination of trees and line plantings on farms.

Less obvious, but at least as important, is that fossil fuels have transformed forestry itself. Nowadays, the harvesting, processing and transporting of wood is heavily supported by the use of fossil fuels, while in earlier times they were entirely based on human and animal power – which themselves get their fuel from biomass. It was the limitations of these power sources that created and shaped coppice management all over the world.

Image: Harvesting wood from pollarded trees in Belgium, 1947. Credit : Zeylemaker, Co., Nationaal Archief (CCO)

Image: Transporting firewood in the Basque Country. Source: Notes on pollards: best practices' guide for pollarding. Gipuzkoaka Foru Aldundía-Diputación Foral de Giuzkoa, 2014.

Wood was harvested and processed by hand, using simple tools such as knives, machetes, billhooks, axes and (later) saws. Because the labour requirements of harvesting trees by hand increase with stem diameter, it was cheaper and more convenient to harvest many small branches instead of cutting down a few large trees. Furthermore, there was no need to split coppiced wood after it was harvested. Shoots were cut to a length of around one metre, and tied together in “faggots”, which were an easy size to handle manually.

It was the limitations of human and animal power that created and shaped coppice management all over the world

To transport firewood, our forebears relied on animal drawn carts over often very bad roads. This meant that, unless it could be transported over water, firewood had to be harvested within a radius of at most 15-30 km from the place where it was used. ¹² Beyond those distances, the animal power required for transporting the firewood was larger than its energy content, and it would have made more sense to grow firewood on the pasture that fed the draft animal. ¹³ There were some exceptions to this rule. Some industrial activities, like iron and potash production, could be moved to more distant forests – transporting iron or potash was more economical than transporting the firewood required for their production. However, in general, coppice forests (and of course also line plantings) were located in the immediate vicinity of the settlement where the wood was used.

In short, coppicing appeared in a context of limits. Because of its faster growth and versatile use of space, it maximised the local wood supply of a given area. Because of its use of small branches, it made manual harvesting and transporting as economical and convenient as possible.

Can Coppicing be Mechanised?

From the twentieth century onwards, harvesting was done by motor saw, and since the 1980s, wood is increasingly harvested by powerful vehicles that can fell entire trees and cut them on the spot in a matter of minutes. Fossil fuels have also brought better transportation infrastructures, which have unlocked wood reserves that were inaccessible in earlier times. Consequently, firewood can now be grown on one side of the planet and consumed at the other.

The use of fossil fuels adds carbon emissions to what used to be a completely carbon neutral activity, but much more important is that it has pushed wood production to a larger – unsustainable – scale. [14] Fossil fueled transportation has destroyed the connection between supply and demand that governed local forestry. If the wood supply is limited, a community has no other choice than to make sure that the wood harvest rate and the wood renewal rate are in balance. Otherwise, it risks running out of fuelwood, craft wood and animal fodder, and it would be abandoned.

Image: Mechanically harvested willow coppice plantation. Shortly after coppicing (right), 3-years old growth (left). Credit: Lignovis GmbH (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Likewise, fully mechanised harvesting has pushed forestry to a scale that is incompatible with sustainable forest management. Our forebears did not cut down large trees for firewood, because it was not economical. Today, the forest industry does exactly that because mechanisation makes it the most profitable thing to do. Compared to industrial forestry, where one worker can harvest up to 60 m3 of wood per hour, coppicing is extremely labour-intensive. Consequently, it cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels.

Coppicing cannot compete in an economic system that fosters the replacement of human labour with machines powered by fossil fuels

Some scientists and engineers have tried to solve this by demonstrating coppice harvesting machines. ¹⁴ However, mechanisation is a slippery slope. The machines are only practical and economical on somewhat larger tracts of woodland (>1 ha) which contain coppiced trees of the same species and the same age, with only one purpose (often fuelwood for power generation). As we have seen, this excludes many older forms of coppice management, such as the use of multipurpose trees and line plantings. Add fossil fueled transportation to the mix, and the result is a type of industrial coppice management that brings few improvements.

Image: Coppiced trees along a brook in 's Gravenvoeren, Belgium. Credits: Geert Van der Linden.

Sustainable forest management is essentially local and manual. This doesn’t mean that we need to copy the past to make biomass energy sustainable again. For example, the radius of the wood supply could be increased by low energy transport options, such as cargo bikes and aerial ropeways, which are much more efficient than horse or ox drawn carts over bad roads, and which could be operated without fossil fuels. Hand tools have also improved in terms of efficiency and ergonomics. We could even use motor saws that run on biofuels – a much more realistic application than their use in car engines. ¹⁵

The Past Lives On

This article has compared industrial biomass production with historical forms of forest management in Europe, but in fact there was no need to look to the past for inspiration. The 40% of the global population consisting of people in poor societies that still burn wood for cooking and water and/or space heating, are no clients of industrial forestry. Instead, they obtain firewood in much of the same ways that we did in earlier times, although the tree species and the environmental conditions can be very different. ¹⁶

A 2017 study calculated that the wood consumption by people in “developing” societies – good for 55% of the global wood harvest and 9-15% of total global energy consumption – only causes 2-8% of anthropogenic climate impacts. ¹⁷ Why so little? Because around two-thirds of the wood that is harvested in developing societies is harvested sustainably, write the scientists. People collect mainly dead wood, they grow a lot of wood outside the forest, they coppice and pollard trees, and they prefer the use of multipurpose trees, which are too valuable to cut down. The motives are the same as those of our ancestors: people have no access to fossil fuels and are thus tied to a local wood supply, which needs to be harvested and transported manually.

Image: African women carrying firewood. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

These numbers confirm that it is not biomass energy that’s unsustainable. If the whole of humanity would live as the 40% that still burns biomass regularly, climate change would not be an issue. What is really unsustainable is a high energy lifestyle. We can obviously not sustain a high-tech industrial society on coppice forests and line plantings alone. But the same is true for any other energy source, including uranium and fossil fuels.

Multiple references: Unrau, Alicia, et al. Coppice forests in Europe. University of Freiburg, 2018. // Notes on pollards: best practices’ guide for pollarding. Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia-Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, 2014. // A study of practical pollarding techniques in Northern Europe. Report of a three month study tour August to November 2003, Helen J. Read. // Aarden wallen in Europa, in “Tot hier en niet verder: historische wallen in het Nederlandse landschap”, Henk Baas, Bert Groenewoudt, Pim Jungerius and Hans Renes, Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, 2012. ↩︎
Logan, William Bryant. Sprout lands: tending the endless gift of trees. WW Norton & Company, 2019. ↩︎
Holišová, Petra, et al. “Comparison of assimilation parameters of coppiced and non-coppiced sessile oaks”. Forest-Biogeosciences and Forestry 9.4 (2016): 553. ↩︎
Perlin, John. A forest journey: the story of wood and civilization. The Countryman Press, 2005. ↩︎
Most of this information comes from a Belgian publication (in Dutch language): Handleiding voor het inventariseren van houten beplantingen met erfgoedwaarde. Geert Van der Linden, Nele Vanmaele, Koen Smets en Annelies Schepens, Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed, 2020. For a good (but concise) reference in English, see Rotherham, Ian. Ancient Woodland: history, industry and crafts. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
While leaf fodder was used all over Europe, it was especially widespread in mountainous regions, such as Scandinavia, the Alps and the Pyrenees. For example, in Sweden in 1850, 1.3 million sheep and goats consumed a total of 190 million sheaves annually, for which at least 1 million hectares deciduous woodland was exploited, often in the form of pollards. The harvest of leaf fodder predates the use of hay as winter fodder. Branches could be cut with stone tools, while cutting grass requires bronze or iron tools. While most coppicing and pollarding was done in winter, harvesting leaf fodder logically happened in summer. Bundles of leaf fodder were often put in the pollarded trees to dry. References: Logan, William Bryant. Sprout lands: tending the endless gift of trees. WW Norton & Company, 2019. // A study of practical pollarding techniques in Northern Europe. Report of a three month study tour August to November 2003, Helen J. Read. // Slotte H., “Harvesting of leaf hay shaped the Swedish landscape”, Landscape Ecology 16.8 (2001): 691-702. ↩︎
Wealleans, Alexandra L. “Such as pigs eat: the rise and fall of the pannage pig in the UK”. Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture 93.9 (2013): 2076-2083. ↩︎
This information is based on several Dutch language publications: Handleiding voor het inventariseren van houten beplantingen met erfgoedwaarde. Geert Van der Linden, Nele Vanmaele, Koen Smets en Annelies Schepens, Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed, 2020. // Handleiding voor het beheer van hagen en houtkanten met erfgoedwaarde. Thomas Van Driessche, Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed, 2019 // Knotbomen, knoestige knapen: een praktische gids. Geert Van der Linden, Jos Schenk, Bert Geeraerts, Provincie Vlaams-Brabant, 2017. // Handleiding: Het beheer van historische dreven en wegbeplantingen. Thomas Van Driessche, Paul Van den Bremt and Koen Smets. Agentschap Onroerend Erfgoed, 2017. // Dirkmaat, Jaap. Nederland weer mooi: op weg naar een natuurlijk en idyllisch landschap. ANWB Media-Boeken & Gidsen, 2006. // For a good source in English, see: Müller, Georg. Europe’s Field Boundaries: Hedged banks, hedgerows, field walls (stone walls, dry stone walls), dead brushwood hedges, bent hedges, woven hedges, wattle fences and traditional wooden fences. Neuer Kunstverlag, 2013. // If line plantings were mainly used for wood production, they were planted at some distance from each other, allowing more light and thus a higher wood production. If they were mainly used as plot boundaries, they were planted more closely together. This diminished the wood harvest but allowed for a thicker growth. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
In fact, coppice forests could also have a location-specific function: they could be placed around a city or settlement to form an impenetrable obstacle for attackers, either by foot or by horse. They could not easily be destroyed by shooting, in contrast to a wall. Source: ⁵ ↩︎
Lime trees were even used for fire prevention. They were planted right next to the baking house in order to stop the spread of sparks to wood piles, haystacks and thatched roofs. Source: ⁵ ↩︎
The fact that living hedges and trees are harder to move than dead wood fences and posts also has practical advantages. In Europe until the French era, there was no land register and boundaries where physically indicated in the landscape. The surveyor’s work was sealed with the planting of a tree, which is much harder to move on the sly than a pole or a fence. Source: ⁵ ↩︎
And, if it could be brought in over water from longer distances, the wood had to be harvested within 15-30 km of the river or coast. ↩︎
Sieferle, Rolf Pieter. The Subterranean Forest: energy systems and the industrial revolution. White Horse Press, 2001. ↩︎
Vanbeveren, S.P.P., et al. “Operational short rotation woody crop plantations: manual or mechanised harvesting?” Biomass and Bioenergy 72 (2015): 8-18. ↩︎
However, chainsaws can have adverse effects on some tree species, such as reduced growth or greater ability to transfer disease. ↩︎
Multiple sources that refer to traditional forestry practices in Africa: Leach, Gerald, and Robin Mearns. Beyond the woodfuel crisis: people, land and trees in Africa. Earthscan, 1988. // Leach, Melissa, and Robin Mearns. “The lie of the land: challenging received wisdom on the African environment.” (1998) // Cline-Cole, Reginald A. “Political economy, fuelwood relations, and vegetation conservation: Kasar Kano, Northerm Nigeria, 1850-1915.” Forest & Conservation History 38.2 (1994): 67-78. ↩︎
Multiple references: Bailis, Rob, et al. “Getting the number right: revisiting woodfuel sustainability in the developing world.” Environmental Research Letters 12.11 (2017): 115002 // Masera, Omar R., et al. “Environmental burden of traditional bioenergy use.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 40 (2015): 121-150. // Study downgrades climate impact of wood burning, John Upton, Climate Central, 2015. ↩︎