Driving to a particularly sustainable wastewater treatment plant? Not necessarily, if Werner Gerhold has his way. He would much rather get on his horse.
The car can stay in the garage, because this time Werner Gerhold is using just one horsepower for his annual appointment at the Jaidhof-Eisenberg small wastewater treatment plant. Gerhold, who is responsible for consulting and sales in Vienna, Lower Austria and Burgenland at Donau Chemie Wassertechnik, gets on the saddle.
"In these times, you have to think about alternatives to the car," smiles Gerhold. After all, the price of a liter of diesel is enough to buy Edi a bag of carrots.
The right solution for the Jaidhof-Eisenberg sewage treatment plant
Edi, a black Frisian, takes Werner Gerhold at a brisk trot from his home town to the small Waldviertel community of Jaidhof in just under fifty minutes. Mayor Franz Aschauer is waiting for the team there to inspect the local small sewage treatment plant together with Werner Gerhold and the responsible sewage attendant.
Only Edi has to stay outside while Gerhold and Aschauer talk shop about the special features of the plant. And there are quite a few of them, because the fact that the community of just 1,222 inhabitants was to get a new wastewater treatment plant after the old one was decommissioned was not actually planned.
"Originally, we were supposed to pump our wastewater to the sewage treatment plant in Krems, but the Krems municipal wastewater association told us that we were too small for that and to contact the municipality of Gföhl instead," explains Franz Aschauer. Without further ado, Jaidhof decided to take matters into their own hands.
The solution: In the Eisengraben district, a second expansion stage was added to a small wastewater treatment plant that had been in operation since 1996; the old plant has been in stand-by mode ever since. "This could be reactivated if our population increases," says Mayor Aschauer.
Energy self-sufficient sewage treatment plant as a role model for sustainability
It is clear that the residents of Jaidhof place their independence above all else. A 15-metre-high small wind turbine and a photovoltaic system supply the small wastewater treatment plant with electricity. "They cover 80 percent of our needs," says Franz Aschauer proudly. Surplus energy can also be regularly fed into the power grid.
This is a particularly environmentally friendly solution and proves that operating their own plant is ecologically and economically more favorable in the long term than pumping wastewater to distant communities.
This is also made possible by the expertise of Donau Chemie, which supplies the sewage treatment plant with around five tons of Donau PAC activis every year, thus guaranteeing smooth operation. Instead of Edi the horse, a three-chamber truck then drops by.