Mobile Phones + Smart Sewers = Reduced Water Pollution

Most of the time when we talk about green mobile phone issues, we’re talking about how to recycle your mobile phone or how to use renewable resources to power your device. However, mobile phones are a form of technology that could also be used in advanced methods of greening the earth. One new project that is getting a lot of attention involves using the antennas on cell phone towers to actually reduce the amount of water pollution affecting urban areas. Early studies of this possibility are looking good and trials will be starting soon to see how well this project works in the real world.

So what’s this all about?

Researchers have figured out that the antennas on mobile phone towers are terrific tools that can be used to measure the amount of rainfall that is falling in real time. These towers are actually better equipped to measure this than the traditional gauges that are currently used. There’s a big technological science behind it but basically the way that the rainfall interferes with the mobile phone tower is a reliable indicator of how much rain is falling. You might be asking “so what?” Well, knowing the amount of rainfall at any given time is the first step in creating smarter sewer systems. This would reduce the amount of water pollution in urban areas, making the entire area healthier and greener for everyone. And it all starts with measuring rain using mobile phone masts.

What are smart sewers?

To understand why this would work, you need to understand a little bit about the problems that sewers face when it rains. Here’s what happens where there is too much rain:

• First too much rain falls unexpectedly.
• That rainwater mixes with sewage inside the pipes.
• The sewer can’t handle as much dirty water as there now is inside of it.
• The dirty water overflows into local streams, lakes and rivers and pollutes them.
• Not only is that gross, but short bursts of pollutants like this can be very harmful to populations of fish and algae in these waters.
• The problem is going to get worse since more rains are predicted in many urban areas due to climate change.

One of the things that we need in order to prevent this problem is a smarter sewer system. We need a sewer system that is capable of diverting and controlling water flow even when unexpected rains occur. This would keep the dirty water in the sewer instead of in our lakes and rivers.

The tower is the gauge that helps a smart sewer.

In summary, mobile phone towers could be used to accurately measure rainfall. This would mean that we would know how much rain was falling even when levels were higher than expected. This could be useful in the design of an intelligent control system for the sewer networks. The sewer itself would need to be redesigned, of course, but the mobile phone tower would play a really important role once the design was in place.

Where is this happening?

The early stages of this project are being completed by a team headed by Jorg Rieckermann of Eawag’s Urban Water Management in Switzerland. Rieckermann is working with the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) as well as folks over at Orange to make this green mobile phones project into a reality. They will be field-testing in two different municipalities in the near future to learn more.

So it’s a good thing that we have all of those mobile phone towers.

This project is one that shows us how the sheer number of mobile phone towers that we have in place in the world today could be useful for a number of different things including important green projects. Many people are unhappy with the mobile mastscape but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, it could be really powerful!

In other mobile phone sewer news

The news about this green mobile phone project is probably the first time that we’ve ever seen news about mobile phones and sewers that was actually good news. Back in 2007, headlines were made because of an unfortunate incident in which a man fell into a sewer and drowned trying to retrieve his mobile phone. And in the summer of 2009, a teenager fell into the sewer because she was texting and didn’t watch where she was going. At least not all mobile phone sewer news is bad news!