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CONSTRUCTED WETLANDS IN THE USA
Citation:
Brown, D. CONSTRUCTED WETLANDS IN THE USA. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., EPA/600/J-95/216, 1994.
Description:
Constructed wetlands are becoming increasingly popular for wastewater treatment around the world. his interest has been due to their low construction and maintenance costs and their appeal as natural treatment systems. etlands have been used to treat a wide variety of wastewaters including domestic (ranging from individual home to municipal systems) industrial, agricultural, mine drainage landfill leachate and urban stormwater. o determine the extent of wetland treatment systems in the USA the Environmental protection Agency (EPA) has sponsored the creation of a database to identify and catalog information about these systems. fter three years of data collection, the database now contains information on 203 wetlands at 178 sites (some sites have more than one system) distributed across the country from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. t also lists five sites in Canada. rom the data collected, it appears that 74% of the wetland systems in the US are constructed; the remainder are natural or hybrid in origin. he majority treat municipal wastewater from small communities - 8 1 % treating less than 5000 M3/d. early two-thirds of American wetlands systems use cattails (Typha spp.) And bulrush (Scirpus spp.) As the predominant vegetation species. his contrasts with European systems which primarily use phragmites. n some respects the US is quite experienced in the intentional use of wetlands for wastewater treatment. he database lists 19 wetlands used for wastewater treatment prior to 1980. he earliest natural marsh wetland was Great Meadows near Concord Massachusetts (1915), and the earliest forested wetland was at Wildwood, Florida in 1955. he use of natural systems is now in decline due to an increase in public concern in the US about the protection of natural wetlands. he earliest constructed wetland was built at Vermontville, Michigan in 1972. owever, the US is behind the rest of the world in the use of subsurface flow (SF) treatment wetlands. ompared to constructed SF systems in Denmark and the United Kingdom dating back to the early 1980s, the first such system wasn't built until 1985 in Pflugerville, Texas. oday, the total number of SF wetlands in the US is less than 70, compared to several hundred systems in Denmark and the United Kingdom alone.