Hello, EcoGen friends! I'm home for the summer break and excited to jump into activities for the environment. First thing is the launch of the Floating Green Filter (FGF) in Sampaloc Lake, which is the largest of the seven lakes of our City.

What is Floating Green Filter?

Have you heard of the Constructed Wetland system? Constructed wetlands is a system that treats waste water using the natural process of plants to improve water quality. Through the root system of selected plants, the water is filtered.  Check this out http://www.epa.gov/owow/wetlands/pdf/ConstructedW.pdf

Constructed wetlands is a great system but our Foundation will pilot a system with a slight difference because what we are using is a floating version, which is why it is called the Floating Green Filter (FGF).  Ths hasn't been done in the Philippines yet.  This is a low-cost, low-tech, low-maintenance but highly effective natural filtration system in water. These FGFs  will absorb pollutants in the water like chemicals from domestic waste water. The FGFs are made of bamboo, rope, foam and some plastic pipes to hold the plants in place. It is so easy to make that anyone can build one.

The people who gave us the idea and helped us make the FGFs are two Chinese nationals from Hubei University. They are Dr. Zhang Jim and Dr. Wang Min, who are both environmental engineers. They have been doing this type of work for over a decade now.  My father met them in the Living Lake Conference in China last November. The Living Lakes International is the biggest organization of lakes around the world.

What we did with the floating green filters was we built them outside one of the sewers coming from one of the communities living by the lake. We built 4 FGFs with a total size of 12 square meters to surround the outlet. The plants we used all came from what we saw by the shoreline, which takes away the risk of invasive species, which has been a problem in many countries.

There is still some resistance from the agency incharge of the lakes (the Laguna Lake Development Authority) and the fisherfolk, but we hope to make them and other stakeholders understand that this is an initiative to clean the lake, not pollute it like other structures on the lake.  We hope that this pilot project will be a success, so that the people of San Pablo and the the whole country will see that it is not that hard and costly to help save the lakes, rivers and ponds.