Making an eco-friendly habitat

Satishraj G Medapatla

Hyderabad: When it comes to owning up a house, the buyer only thinks of the facilities that are available for him, without giving a minute's thought on whether the housing project is in accordance with the environmental norms. It is high time that all the stakeholders in the realty sector give a serious thought on developing housing projects that are environment-friendly, self reliant, giving out zero wastage and using every inch of property for energy conservation. Here is a peek into what it takes to make such a habitat that would synchronise with nature and not be a burden on the environment.

Designing housing projects: The large turnkey projects at the start of the designing itself consider environmental engineering which is the integration of science and engineering principles to improve the natural environment (air, water, and/or land resources), to provide healthy water, air, and land for human habitation.

Water recycling Without water any housing project turns dud. And societies that depend on Municipal Corporation for water are facing problems due to the unabated growing population in the urban areas. By installing reverse osmosis (RO) plants any housing society can have their own drinking water source. Through RO systems ground water or bore water can be made potable. All the so called bottled mineral water like Kinley, Aquafina etc use same technology to purify bore water to drinking purposes. These RO plants need regular maintenance. The waste water from RO plants should be diverted to tanks where water is used for gardening and other purposes.

Water recycling plant: Different methods like ultra filtration, sand filtration, carbon filtration and aeration are used to recycle the water depending upon the source of the water. From washing clothes, bathing etc the water can be supplied to tanks that are used only for flushing and gardening.

Sewage Treatment Plants (STP) The STPs are installed to see that the raw sewage is not passed directly into the water body or municipal drains. STPs use different levels of processing to separate water from the floc material. The floc is diverted to settling tanks where it gets dried to form sludge that is used as manure for plantations in forests and horticulture purposes. The water, after bringing it to sufficient biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) is again sent to water body or to the municipal drains.

Dry cleaning Instead of using water for washing clothes and lines that consume use quantities, a dry cleaning within the housing project can save huge amounts of water and also protect the clothes from fading fast. Dry cleaning machines use chemicals as a medium to clean linen and the best part is that 97 per cent of the chemicals are retained and are recycled again for washing. A A proper technician is needed to maintain and operate the machine.

Rain-water harvesting The most important thing is to install rain-water harvesting mechanism to recharge the ground water. Depending upon the area almost 40 to 60 per cent of the ground water can be recharged. Care should be taken that proper filtration method is installed and every year before the rains begin the entire system is repaired as the in the first rain itself there are chances that the system gets choked up.