GREEN: Living wall breathes life into historic building in Ohio City

Flip a rain garden 90 degrees and what could you get? Something both striking and functional.

One beneficiary of the District’s Green Infrastructure Grant Program is the Striebinger Block building on West 29th Street in Ohio City.

The 1919 building boasts a “living wall” that is fed by rainwater collected from the roof and held in ground-level cisterns. During dry weather, the water is pumped up to plants mounted on the brick façade. Catch basins at the bottom of the wall also capture and recirculate water back to the cisterns.

The Living Wall joins other District-funded green infrastructure projects in Ohio City, including rain gardens at Transformer Station (also on W. 29th) and the nearly-completed West Side Market parking lot. Together, these projects are taking advantage of Ohio City’s redevelopment activity and great soils to promote on-site stormwater management and reduce stormwater in the combined sewer system.

Story by Yolanda Kelly and Michael Uva

RELATED NEWS:

• GREEN: 6 ways green infrastructure is taking root in Cleveland
• PROJECTS: 7 things to know about green infrastructure work in East Cleveland
• FUNDING: Funding opportunities for watershed groups and green infrastructure projects

RIVER: Branches, bristles, and balls baskets built for better bulkheads

The latest customized contraptions along the Cuyahoga River bulkheads were added this month to help provide habitat for migrating fish, and the elements used in this phase of the project might surprise you.

Cuyahoga County Planning Commission, with the help of Biohabitats and the Regional Sewer District, installed the iteration of these baskets October 7 along the steel bulkheads of the Cuyahoga River navigation channel. They are intended to provide a safe space for fish migrating up or down the channel, a stretch that is otherwise "daunting," as Biohabitats describes it.

PROJECTS: Urban Agriculture project features will protect Lake Erie, plant seeds of knowledge

"Cleveland is known across the country for its re-purposing vacant and abandoned properties for urban agriculture."

Those are the words of our Deputy Director of Watershed Programs Kyle Dreyfuss-Wells. And now, as this home-grown movement gets a boost from our green infrastructure program, a new urban ag project will help manage stormwater, reduce pollution to Lake Erie, and offer a new site for environmental outreach and education.

Located in the Kinsman neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side, the Green Ambassador—Urban Agriculture project is designed to manage 7 million gallons of stormwater a year, reducing combined sewer overflow volumes to Lake Erie by 1.6 million gallons and improving water quality when complete in 2017.

GREEN: Um yeah, even wastewater's not supposed to look like this. #StPatricksDay

Green is the color of the St. Patrick's Day holiday and the Chicago River that is dyed for celebration, but some colors come with questions.

Especially when they're not supposed to be there.

Southerly Assistant Superintendent Kevin Zebrowski shared that oddly colored green water has come flowing into our Southerly Wastewater Treatment Plant several times before, like the time shown here from 2007.

"We isolated it," he said of this example, working with our investigators to determine possible sources of three separate incidents.

"We suspected and installed downstream samplers for a company [within our service area] which manufactures dye for plastics. It stopped with no other events."

"At a similar time [2008], Akron had a similar event where the EPA caught someone dumping powdered green dye in the sanitary sewer," he said.

If all the water at a treatment plant is being treated anyway, does the color coming into the plant matter? Kevin said yes. "We have had in our permit that we cannot discharge effluent [the treated water] with any color." Treatment plant staff and our Water Quality & Industrial Surveillance Team collaborate to track down the cause.

Investigators can use any number of clues coming from the flow to find the source and take necessary action. Our laboratory conducts nearly 200,000 tests on more than 25,000 samples every year to ensure the processes in our plants and the quality of our effluent is safe.

Southerly is not the only plant to face issues of colorful influent, he said. "At Westerly [in Cleveland], there was a printing company that would often clean their process tanks; our operators would see various colors coming into the plant. They would sometimes get red which would interfere with the laboratory running tests."

RELATED STORIES:

• GREEN: 5 stories of green with Cuyahoga River connections

INTERACTIVE: 29 green projects helping neighborhoods slow the flow

When every drop counts, every solution matters.

Since 2009, businesses and organizations across Northeast Ohio have taken steps to manage stormwater on their properties with the help of a Small Scale Stormwater Demonstration Projects grants program.

The interactive map below shows you 29 such projects—from rain gardens to storage solutions to bioswales and more—and how they are alleviating local stormwater problems and reducing stormwater flows in local sewers.

You can also view the map at full size.

GREEN: 46 floors of lush forests and room service

Image via clearpointresidencies.com

This rendering of a Sri Lankan hotel that just got a green light for 2016 takes sustainability to a whole new level. Forty-six floors to be exact.

A Fast Company feature described this project as a "living high rise covered in a forest," inspired by a hotel that had been carved into a lush mountainside. It will feature 13,000 square feet of solar panels and a plant irrigation system fed by recycled wastewater.

NEWS: "Is there a cheaper, greener way?" Let's take a look. #neorsdGREEN

A story posted today on cleveland.com asks the question, "Is there a cheaper, greener way" to prevent billions of gallons of sewage and stormwater from polluting Lake Erie?

It's the first in a series of articles set to look at the financial, green, and comparative aspects of our 25-year program known as Project Clean Lake [video], an effort to reduce combined sewer overflows that affect our Great Lake during heavy storms.

The article raises good questions and we hope continues to further productive conversation about our water resources and how they must be protected responsibly. But there four quotes from the story that could benefit from more perspective.

GREEN: #neorsdREF will be a clean, green, sustainability machine

Incinerating with sustainability in mind? Yes, you read that correctly.

The Sewer District is nearing completion on its LEED-certified Renewable Energy Facility (or REF), the future energy-generating home of three new incinerators that will burn biosolids more efficiently with less resources. The new REF will be up and running later this summer, and we'll feature the project at this Sunday's EarthFest presented by Earth Day Coalition at the Cuyahoga County Fairgrounds.

LIST: Top 7-and-a-half ways wastewater treatment is like a romantic relationship

OK, it would be way too easy to make a J. Geils Band reference here when comparing romance to wastewater treatment, but there are far more similarities between cleaning sewage and finding that special someone than you may have expected.

Here are a few.

Don't be afraid to confront a dirty past.

This undated Cleveland Plain Dealer photo by Marv Greebe was taken sometime in the 1960s, showing former PD reporter Richard Ellers on a trip along the (to put it mildly) polluted Cuyahoga River.

20 WAYS: Going green well beyond clean

Sure, we've been recycling water since before recycling was cool, but in our line of work, don't we have expectations to do even more when it comes to sustainability?

We do. And we are.