On the treatment of peepee in Koh Phi Phi
Tags: Koh Phi Phi, smells, Thailand, Waste, wastewater treatment, wetlands
First of all I’d like to apologize to our Thai readers for taking liberties with the Thai language, subjecting it to puerile puns such as the one in the title of this post. More generally, I’d like to apologize to everyone else for subjecting you to potty humour. As a visitor to PlanningPool you, Dear Reader, deserve better than this.
But not in this post. It’s late. And I’m sometimes terribly immature.
In my defense, the title is at least somewhat relevant. Koh Phi Phi is a small resort island a queazy hour-and-a-half by boat from the southeastern Thai city of Phuket. After a bout of mildly academic work in Singapore, a fine city that could one day serve as a convincing substitute for “The Village” in a Southeast Asian version of The Prisoner, I found myself on vacation here. And it was here that I was confronted with that fact that, at some point, I had become a planning nerd.
Soon after I roused myself from a nap on the beach one late afternoon, I noticed an odd odour; not unlike the pungent smell of durian, an improbable fruit that affronts the senses with a tang reminiscent of garlic and onions fermenting in the toilet bowl of a highway truck stop. I’m still not sure what compelled me to follow my nose, but that I did. A friend and I, also a planning student, wandered past vendors preparing chicken satay on roadside charcoal grills, past hoards of British and Israeli beach goers caked with coconut tanning oil, past stands selling fresh fruit smoothies, to the source of the smell: a waste water treatment plant dressed up as a constructed wetland. It was beautiful.
This is where that smell is coming from?
And yet, rather odd. What was immediately clear was that the engineering and design philosophy of the plant represented a dramatic shift away from traditional thinking about how we should interact with our sewage. In the West at least, there is a tendency to want to keep our sewage away far away, “over there”, out of sight, out of smell, and out of mind. Sewage, it seems, has long been considered to be devoid of any redeeming aesthetic qualities.
Not so here. The designers of this plant are suggesting to us that this need not be the case; that sewage need not be ugly – that it can be a beautiful thing. Why resign our waste to underground tanks when it can be refined and celebrated alongside the great gardens of the world, preserving precious water resources at the same time? Why not make wastewater treatment a collective, social experience?
On Koh Phi Phi, we are being asked to commune with our effluent.
“The Flower and the Butterfly”, as the constructed wetlands have been named, has wastewater circulating through patches of heliconia and papyrus. The grayish water made an elegant circuit through the roots of these plants, presumably the most chronically thirsty and least picky of the kingdom Plantae, seeping its way past tiled benches, paved walkways, and a gazebo.
All of which were notably unused.
Aside from a pair of curious, intrepid urban planning students, a few emaciated chickens, and squadrons of voracious mosquitoes, there was no one there. No local islanders, no tourists. It’s worth noting that the plant was situated along a busy pedestrian (wonderfully, the island was entirely pedestrian) thoroughfare connecting the islands densest commercial quarter and the warren of hilly alleyways that made up the bustling backpackers ghetto.
So perhaps unfairly, I was quick to dismiss the plant as a failed experiment; the product of a few forward thinking designers and engineers that optimistically sought to turn the flushings of thousands of drunken and hung-over tourists into an aesthetic experience. Cultural and social aversions to bodily waste be damned.
As to the intentions of the designers and funders, I was speculating wildly. But at the time, I might have been forgiven for thinking this. I had attempted to make enquiries about the to the locals, only to be met with quizzical looks here, and eye-rolling chuckles there. After all, I was on vacation. Why would I want to know about that smelly sewage plant?
And so it wasn’t until I returned home that I found some answers. It turns out that the current plant was built to replace one that was swept away by the 2004 tsunami that devastated the island. Funded by Danida, a Danish international development assistance agency, the current wetland came about as a result of:
“collaboration between islanders, representatives of multiple levels of government, and national and international academics and consultants has led to the design and construction of a new system that will not only remove contaminants in an environmentally sensitive way, but will then return the cleansed water back to the hotels, restaurants, and homes of the island. Watering lawns or irrigating gardens, flushing toilets or washing pathways will all be safely possible with reclaimed water.
The story of The Flower and the Butterfly Park is a positive and hopeful view that not only is post-tsunami rebuilding being done, but an opportunity being seized for innovation and improvement.”
But it turns out that all is not well at the wetland, or at least, it wasn’t well for a while. The ministry of foreign affairs of Denmark has highlighted massive deficiencies with the design of the wetland at Koh Phi Phi, and suggests that remedies are being sought from the main consultants on the project. No further news on that front.
So it could well be that shoddy engineering is keeping folks at bay, deprived of the beauty of their constructed wetland. Maybe an effective wastewater treatment plant isn’t supposed to smell as the one on Koh Phi Phi did. Or maybe it’s that, try as we might, we just can’t shake our aversion to our own waste.
Vanessa said:
Jul 21, 09 at 11:19 amCool post and nice photos!
I once pilgrimaged to the Findhorn ecovillage in Scotland to tour their “shit-to-flowers” sewage treatment plant. For whatever reason, tours were closed on the days I was there, so I never got the formal introduction. However I can tell you from circling the greenhouse structure and sniffing speculatively that the place didn’t smell like much of anything.
I suspect that something is amiss in the operations of the Flower and the Butterfly.
Adam Hyslop said:
Jul 22, 09 at 1:29 pmInteresting post Farzine. It sounds like a case of innovative design meets poor execution. Though I think completely eliminating the smell-factor from sewage is pretty much impossible. Even conventional sewage treatment plants emit a pretty foul odor. I bike home regularly from North Vancouver over the Lions Gate Bridge which passes the Lionsgate Sewage Treatment plant in West Vancouver. And lets just say I feel for the people living downwind of that thing (mostly members of the squamish first nation). I’m working on building my lung capacity so I can hold my breath for long enough to pass through it.
I think the intention behind the Koh Phi Phi project was great, if slightly misguided (ie. benches/gazebos next to an effective settling pond). Perhaps it’s a scale issue. Smaller ‘flows’ from a single neighbourhood/street for example might not create as potent of a stench, but if you’re dealing with waste from an entire community it’s probably hard to avoid. I think the answer might be to employ a similar ecological approach but on a smaller, more dispersed scale. Perhaps people should be having communion with their effluent in their own back yards?
Ellen Larcombe said:
Jul 23, 09 at 3:43 pmI agree that this is a case of good ecological intention but problematic implementation and design. Also interesting to note is that this constructed wetland is situated next to the area where local residents live, far from the nostrils of tourists present on the island’s resorts. The environmental justice aspect of this case, however, is complicated by the fact that this isn’t a typical wastewater treatment plant – with nasty chemicals and an eyesore structure to accompany the smell. Also, it sounds like ‘islanders’ were engaged in the planning process. Good intention, islander participation, sound ecological principles and pretty landscape aside, I still wouldn’t want to hold my breath every time I left my home. As a concluding point, while some flaws clearly exist in the design of the ‘flower and the butterfly’ wetland, the concept behind the design is one that should be commended. Hopefully when the design problems are addressed the functionality and appeal of Koh Phi Phi’s wetland will rise to the quality of the values that brought it into existence in the first place.
Daniella said:
Jul 24, 09 at 3:28 pmThanks Farzine! That’s really interesting! From the sounds (smells?) of it, it seems like this wastewater treatment facility isn’t working so great. Maybe because Thailand is hotter, the plants can’t absorb waste fast enough?
Jeremy said:
Aug 19, 09 at 11:37 amI stayed on Koh Phi Phi for about two weeks in October of 2006. My bungalow was not more than 75 meters away from the treatment facility/park and not once was there a smell bad enough to be offensive or even a particular smell that I can recall. I suppose it’s possible that it just didn’t smell when I was there, but there are a number of factors that may produce a smell sometimes and not others. Besides, I think it had just been completed when I was there. The main thing that I recall being bothersome were the millions of frogs that occupied the wetlands.
Perhaps it wasn’t perfectly engineered or conceived, but there is far too great of potential in constructed wetlands to disregard them and continue with anaerobic treatment facilities. And to be completely honest, the only reason I even concede that it was poorly conceived is due to the fact that I never ventured into the park myself, but only walked past it on my way to pass out after a hard day of rock climbing or a hard night of drinking Sang Som buckets. So despite being pretty, it really is hard to grasp the idea of taking a stroll through s#!t park.
One thing that needs to be clarified in Adam’s response is though, is that the benches are not next to a settling pond, they are next to the polishing ponds. There’s a pretty big difference. In anaerobic systems, settling is one of the first stages of treatment, whereas in this case, polishing happens after three or four phases of treatment. The water at that point is not much different than the hillside runoff.
Anywho, I’m glad that I came across this post. I’m currently working on my master’s thesis for a degree in architecture, designing an eco resort for Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. So far I have conceived the grounds to basically be a constructed wetland that creates teak and bamboo forests that can be harvested for the construction of the resort and later sold for additional profit. The idea is that while water is treated, carbon is being sequestered in the biomass. “The Flower and the Butterfly” has been a major source of inspiration and schematic planning, but I may want to take the thoughts here into consideration.