Peggy's Cove is a tiny fishing village on St Margaret's Bay in the Regional Municipality of Halfiax, Nova Scotia. It has become one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country drawing over a half million visitors annually and was chosen as the site-to-see for the G7 Economic Summit meeting in 1997. The Clivus composting systems and greywater purification vegetable garden fitted by the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism and Economic Development in a purpose-built washroom building adjacent to the Government parking lot at the entrance to the village provide a daily seasonal average of 2,000 visitors with completely odourless, ecology-favouring sanitation facilities which, in themselves, have become a must-see point of interest for environmentally-focused engineers, architects, and planners visiting Nova Scotia. This washroom is Canada's second total recycling washroom facility--(the first being the BC Ministry of Environment, Lands and Parks' Liard Hotsprings Provincial Park Clivus washroom just off the Alaskan Highway near Fort Nelson (about 100 km south of the Yukon border).
Background: The.Peggy's Cove Clivus facility has five toilets in the women's section and two toilets and three urinals on the men's..The greywater is purified in an outdoor soilbed of Clivus' design adjacent to the washroom building....a vegetable garden planted with corn, lettuces, squash, cucumbers and tomatoes enjoyed by Tourism Nova Scotia's resident staff.
Analysis of end-product: The physical character of the Clivus liquid compost has been shown in NS government tests to be odour-free, pathogen-free and with a plant-nutrient profile virtually identical to popular, commercially available garden fertilisers such as "Rapid-Gro".This "compost tea" is collected and stored on-site and is eventually transferred to the Provincial Department of Forestry for application as fertiliser at its sapling plantations.
Treated greywater: the samples collected were odourless and transparent ..and, in fact, superior in quality to the groundwater on site. Chemical analysis showed that nitrogen content was low and BOD not detectable. The soilbed appears to provide excellent greywater treatment; and the low volume of collectable treated water --barely a gallon after thousands of gallons of greywater in-put from washstands and janitor's sinks over the long tourist season (April through October) indicates effective evapotranspiration.
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by Carl Lindstrom ©
