EnviroCenter Leading the Charge to Reduce Polluted Runoff
An office building in Jessup, Maryland, is working to protect the Bay by capturing and treating polluted runoff on its site.
Owner Stan Sersen explains why he created the EnviroCenter.
“One of the main reasons that we’re doing all of this is because we’re really concerned about the Chesapeake Bay, and we’re concerned about all the nutrients and the runoff that goes into the Chesapeake Bay. So we though that it was our duty, really, as a developer and as a landowner to capture that water and to treat it more than what the minimum regulations require us to. So with that, we are taking everything that hits the site, everything that hits the roof, and we bring it down and we capture it into some rain gardens and rain boxes.”
“What we do here at the EnviroCenter is that we take our rain water and we capture it and we use it in our water feature. So we’ve created a water feature, and what we also found as part of our water feature is that we were getting a lot of nitrogen buildup from the amount of traffic we have. So off to the left you’ll actually see that we have a small constructed wetland that we’ve created.”
The EnviroCenter will soon begin construction on the second phase of the building, which will take polluted runoff from the nearby highway onto its property to be cleaned and infiltrated, rather than running off into a nearby stream.
“The beauty on this for stormwater is that we’re taking all of the water that hits our one-acre site, plus all of the water that comes from upstream and the state highway, and we’re going to be infiltrating – essentially, running all that water through a series of stormwater management recharge systems. There’s two of them: one at the lower part of the site, and one up here that catches the highway water. That will end up going into a cistern for water reclamation, and then we will be running that into an infiltration trench and infiltrating all of that water into the sand and gravel below.”
“So [the stormwater] gets captured in the inlet on the street, it goes into a recharge system where it cleans the water, takes the sediments and all of the dirt and debris and the oil out, and then that cleaner water gets sent to the infiltration area underneath the parking lot. And that all gets infiltrated back into the groundwater aquifer.”
“Being a steward of the Chesapeake Bay and having grown up on the Chesapeake Bay, I’m very sensitive to all of the issues pertaining to the Bay and stormwater. So one of the biggest parts of being a green building is the site that it sits on. So I think it’s incumbent on everyone to do their part. Even the smallest part: from taking a drainage swale in front of your property and converting it into a biofiltration is important to do. That can be done very simply with the creation of a rain garden, or capturing water off of your roof, for example, and then using that to water your plants and vegetation. I think it’s a simple thing to do and it’s something that everybody should be doing.”
To learn more about the EnviroCenter, visit www.enviro-center.com.