How to Get Involved in Community Water Restoration

Striving for and maintaining a high standard for groundwater and surface water is a critical component to improving overall water quality. By reducing and controlling the use of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and manure, we can help eliminate contamination and reduce the dumping of waste and compounds into our waterways.

Another key component to improving our communities’ water quality is by protecting and restoring our watersheds. A watershed is an area where multiple waterways drain into one body of water. Properly improving, managing, and protecting watersheds requires an understanding of how possible pollutants end up in the watershed, and ultimately, how as a community pollution can be avoided.

Communities across the country are beginning to realize the advantages of watershed management and wetland restoration as a solution to their water quality challenges. For this reason, it’s important to support your local environmental restoration leaders and their work to help improve water quality, maintain healthy watersheds and regularly monitor changes.

What is Nonpoint Pollution

Nonpoint pollution contaminates a watershed from multiple sources rather than from one specific identified source. This occurs when rainwater carries chemicals, trash, sedimen,t and other pollutants from areas like farms, cities, construction sites, and residential areas into streams, rivers, lakes, ponds and the ocean. Over time, these pollutants contaminate the body of water causing the plants and animals to suffer.

Common pollutants are pesticides, insecticides, fertilizer, motor oil, antifreeze, sediment, salt, pet waste, bacteria, nutrients, and trash.

Here are some simple ways you can act and help reduce nonpoint pollution in watersheds:

1. Keep your grass clippings off sidewalks, driveways, and streets to prevent them from being washed away and ending up in our water. Consider mulching your grass to reduce the need for fertilizer, as the grass clippings break down; nutrients are released into your lawn. Eliminating the need for fertilizer and ultimately lessen the amount of fertilizer that ends up in our water.
2. Surprisingly enough, leaves can be an even bigger problem than grass clippings. As soon as you see leaves in your yard, it is important to compost them to prevent them from ending up in our waters. Also, regularly cleaning the leaves from your gutters will stop them from being washed away with the rain.
3. If you must fertilize your lawn, be sure to use a zero-phosphorous fertilizer. Additional phosphorous from fertilizers and pesticides can cause explosive growth of algae which form a green scum on the top of the water.  One pound of phosphorous in runoff water can result in nearly 500 pounds of algae growth! This algae growth blocks sunlight from entering the water, preventing photosynthesis and plant growth. As the algae decay, it uses up all the oxygen in the water and harm fish and underwater creatures.
4. Reduce storm water runoff from your property by making sure your downspouts drain onto porous rather than hard surfaces. Rain barrels are an excellent way to collect rain water for watering plants. Ultimately, the less runoff water, the better- every bit counts!

How to Help Improve Water Quality in Your Community

• Plan a Community Clean-Up Day
  We all should share a common responsibility for protecting the water quality of our lakes and rivers. Setting up a community clean-up day not only is a great way to remove trash from our local shores but it also helps raise awareness about water pollution and watershed health.
• Monitor Water Quality
  Regularly measure and record key indicators of water quality in your local lake and rivers to track any progress or changes as this can help early identification of potential risks.

How Clean-Flo Can Help with Watershed Management

At Clean-Flo, we recognize the problems created by external nutrient loading and their effect on water quality. It is desirable to stop known sources of pollutants to the extent possible. Nutrient diversion may prevent some of the incoming nutrients from entering the water body.  However, it does nothing to reduce nutrients already in the water body, nothing to reduce bottom muck, nothing to improve fish, and little to reduce water weeds and algae. For these reasons, CLEAN-FLO’s unique aeration system called Continuous Laminar Flow Inversion and Oxygenation is an excellent addition to any watershed management or nutrient diversion project for improved water quality.

In aquaculture, much cost and effort are put into adding nutrients to lakes and ponds throughout the world to produce fish growth. Our philosophy has become such that we do not consider nutrient loading to be a problem necessarily, but often a potential asset. Put another way, often it is not that nutrients are entering water bodies that are a problem, but how the nutrients are used in the water bodies that can become a problem. Are these nutrients producing water weeds and blue-green algae, or are they producing healthy fish?

CLEAN-FLO aeration systems reduce the nutrients within a water body. CLEAN-FLO mainly  nutrients from feeding water weeds and algae and cycles them into higher levels of the food chain while reducing their consumption by excessive algae and weeds.  CLEAN-FLO aeration systems counteract eutrophication and significantly enhances recreational swimming, boating and fishing. Our integrated program, which includes the addition of natural beneficial bacteria and enzymes, accomplishes this.

Let us solve your problem naturally! To learn more about CLEAN-FLO’s natural pond aeration systems and pond restoration products, contact us today!