Garden Communities (ePub)

During my civil engineering studies in Aachen, Germany, I was introduced to wastewater management, and I immediately knew what I wanted to do: prevent open dumping of wastewater by building wastewater treatment plants in coastal cities and towns. During my PhD, I wrote my doctoral thesis about the computer simulation of water treatment plants. From that experience, I came to realize that conventional sewage collection networks and wastewater treatment plants did not actually make much sense. Why not reuse the nutrients in human waste to produce humus and manure rather than pollute water? Such questioning of the status quo naturally made me a rebel (which, to be honest, I quite enjoyed). To break new ground, I founded an engineering consultancy in Lubeck in northern Germany on the Baltic Sea.

In Lubeck, I worked to develop new wastewater treatment concepts. It was only later that I realized that when you know that what you are doing is right, despite setbacks, it will work in the end. I experienced the typical reactions to rebels: at first, I was ridiculed; then came vehement attacks in many of my presentations. Later, these innovative water concepts became a major topic of discussion and many millions of research dollars were invested into them (these millions unfortunately did not go to the rebel!).

I developed a wastewater concept to produce liquid fertilizer and energy. The process used wastewater collected from vacuum-powered toilets that was combined with green waste produced in a new housing development. We constructed a pilot-scale neighborhood to pilot the concept, and since then several similar facilities have been built based on this model, especially in China. In Hamburg, one such settlement is currently being built for about two thousand inhabitants. And an even bigger one is under development now in Sweden.

It took about 25 years for my innovative ideas to be recognized as sensible (and not totally crazy!). Unfortunately, the

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