Stormwater Management

Stormwater runoff is excess water not absorbed by soil after heavy rains. It flows over surfaces such as roads, parking lots, building roofs, driveways, lawns, and gardens. On its journey to larger bodies of water (streams, lakes, and rivers), municipal and industrial stormwater can carry a wide range of potentially harmful environmental contaminants, such as metals, oil and grease, pesticides, and fertilizers. These types of contaminants pollute rural water, damage recreational and commercial fisheries, and degrade the beauty of affected waterways, among other things. Stormwater runoff must be treated before it is discharged into water to meet the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System regulations. To comply, some municipalities and industries are turning to solutions that involve compost technology instead of more expensive traditional treatment methods, such as vegetated filter strips or grassy swales (phytoremediation) and holding ponds. These traditional methods require much larger tracts of land than methods utilizing compost and are limited in their removal of contaminants. In one industrial area,
for example, a traditional holding pond required 3.5 acres and cost $45,000, while a compost stormwater system, designed to handle the same amount of runoff, required only 0.5 acre, required less maintenance, and cost $17,300.
Source: EPA website