The Greener Waste Modular Reed Bed was featured in this article in @One Alliance Magazine, you can see the whole magazine here,

The @one Alliance made a fantastic start to AMP5, setting a terrific benchmark for others to follow. And it wasn’t easy. The first Wastewater non Infrastructure project of AMP5 was a fast-track challenge at Witcham Wastewater Treatment Works near Ely in Cambridgeshire.

The site needed upgrading to meet new Environment Agency compliance consents and to cope with additional housing growth in the area. With a short design time and a construction window of just 12 weeks, teams also had to provide a small footprint solution at the lowest cost. Project Manager, Paul Green, said: “We installed four lamellas* which had been recycled from another site; refurbished two pumping stations and fitted various flow and return pipelines underground. We also added two new control panels and upgraded the telemetry.

“The highlight of the scheme was the installation of four, small-footprint reed beds. Traditionally reed beds are the size of a football pitch, but we were able to reduce that size by two-thirds using an innovative approach.” Using technology new to the Alliance, the small reed beds were made from baskets filled with different sized pebbles in two different zones with an array of reeds in each of the baskets. This allows water to flow through the pebbles more naturally with the reeds doing their work on the solids capture more than the traditional ‘hole in the ground’ artificial reed beds. Said Paul: “There was success at every stage of this project. The business plan cost for Witcham was near to £1.4 million and we delivered, on time, for £960,000, saving more than £400,000. “Using less space also saved a lengthy procurement process for buying the land and applying for permissions and land change notices which in turn could have proved detrimental to the delivery programme and environment. We also saved embedded and operational carbon

the small footprint reed beds..