Floating Wetlands
Floating Treatment Media has proven itself a very efficient, low-cost way to enhance municipal wastewater treatment plants. You can retro-fit it to existing facilities with minimal cost or long-term overheads – or work the media into the design of new facilities with low operational costs.
You can use it in any water environment requiring treatment. It is remarkably effective in reducing excess nutrients and removing sediment from the water column, improving water quality overall. Floating wetlands also provide additional aesthetic and habitat for wildlife.
Improving Land Value
Floating Treatment Wetlands renew the local community by enhancing waterfront beautification, amenity and water quality programs. Lifting property value and liveability, these green assets protect our waterways. Systems can be retrofit in existing ponds, lakes and streams.
Zero Land Use
Reducing land take compared with constructed wetlands or conventional bioretention, Floating Wetlands occupy smaller site footprints and are designed for placement on open water bodies – improving land useability, community access and lot yield.
Sustainable Waterways
Floating Wetlands mimic natural green ecosystems – with minimal environmental impacts. They require no power to operate, the manufacturing process is low-energy, and the plants are eco-sourced to harmonise with natural vegetation.
Habitats for Local Fauna & Flora
Providing floating island habitats for local species, such as frogs, birds, turtles and fish, floating wetlands allow wildlife and plants to thrive. Mirroring natural waterway ecosystems, they can be customised with native plant selections and local flora to support biodiversity.
Robust Riverway Performance
Meeting the demands of your project’s community, climate and water conditions, our Floating Wetlands are designed with custom anchoring to meet the demands of your waterways – with extensive testing in areas subject to wave chop, water movement, wind loading and boating use.
Supercharged Pollutant Removal
Exposed plant roots in the water column create a network of natural, biological stormwater treatment pathways. Providing increased surface area for biofilm growth, these microorganism hotspots drive sedimentation, nitrification, and reduce algal blooms.
Features & Benefits
Atlan’s Floating Treatment Wetlands are floating modules that support the establishment of wetland vegetation, and thereby allows the creation of a floating wetland environment on top of a permanent waterbody.
These systems mimic a wetland’s ability to absorb nutrient loads. The Floating Treatment Wetland becomes a virtually self sustaining system with minimal maintenance requirements.
An environmentally-sound and sustainable way of cleaning water
In stormwater applications, the installation of floating wetlands into inlet zones or detention lagoons greatly enhances the stormwater cleaning process by removing:
- Total suspended solids
- Nutrients
- Gross pollutants
- Heavy metals
- Fine colloidal and particulates
Independently tested and validated, these systems provide high-rate performance in both average flow and storm events.
APPLICATIONS
- Municipal wastewater treatment
- Stormwater treatment
- Industrial wastewater treatment
- Stream and lake restoration
- Beautification of community facilities
- Golf courses or facilities that utilise treated waste water effluent
Customisable Solutions
Floating Treatment Wetlands are available in a range of customisable solutions from size, shapes, functionality and environmental capabilities.
Our experienced team are available to guide you through the design process and can work with you to achieve your project goals.
Custom Modular Designs
Floating Treatment Wetlands is a modular system which can be installed in stages. This proves beneficial where monetary budget constraints restrict the ability to install full systems in one financial year.
Each floating module measures approximately 4m x 2.3m each, and are joined together with nylon bolts, to create virtually any size of area.
Staging also proves beneficial where discharge consents may change in the future while a smaller system meets current demands. A simple additional modular upgrade can be retrofitted at a later stage to future proof the wastewater plant.
The Floating Wetlands have been modelled and tested to be installed in areas subject to wave chop and water movement mixed with wind loads. The floating Wetlands are constructed with significant allowance for movement and flex, thus making them suitable for installations in areas exposed to boat and wave movement.
The floating wetlands, which can be used in any water environment requiring treatment, provide a lush and fertile base for plants and vegetation to grow. As the roots spread down through the fibrous structure of the wetlands, an extraordinarily vast activated surface area is created for microbes and bacteria to take on their role of bio-remediation – the use of micro-organisms to remove pollutants.
The microbes and bacteria are UV sensitive, and adhere to the roots and microscopic hairs of the plants. Secreting sticky extracellular proteins, they exist in environs of biofilm within the fibrous structure of the wetlands themselves.
It is within these biofilms which microbes and bacteria trap and digest organic matter and nutrients in stormwater, including total suspended solids, biochemical oxygen demand, nitrogen and phosphorus.
What makes our floating treatment wetlands a unique scientific innovation, that has created a revolution within the water treatment industry, is the massive activated surface area they provide for microbes and bacteria to survive.
- Anaerobic digestion
- Odour mitigation
- Nitrification processes
- De-nitrification and polishing
- Reduction in Bio-chemical oxygen demand
- Removal of TSS
- Reduction in faecal coliforms
- Reduction in phosphorus
- pH stabilisation
Perhaps the greatest advantage of our Floating Treatment Media is that you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands – even millions – of dollars in land acquisition, building new facilities and hiring new staff to run them.
You might have an oxidation pond, lake or stream that isn’t meeting water quality standards any more – so instead of building a new one, or taking a mechanical approach, we put our Floating Wetlands system straight onto the existing asset.
We can assist you to meet your on-site requirements, and design a custom solution for you – or work with your existing consultants to achieve the same end.
Our Floating Treatment Media takes a low capital investment compared to traditional mechanical systems – especially since you can retrofit it to existing assets, meaning no need to buy land or build new ponds.
It also has very low operating and maintenance costs compared to other systems – and there are no operational energy costs whatsoever.
For example, we installed our Floating Treatment Media on one client’s anaerobic pond to eliminate odour. It was a 100% success, and our client achieved an annual energy cost saving of over $150,000.
The treatment process is simple, being completely biological – and highly effective. In fact, the biological nature of the treatment is exactly why it is so effective: because naturally-occurring microbes and symbiotic relationships are unsurpassed as a water-cleaning “system”.
In rigorous scientific studies, our media consistently performed to a far higher standard than required by water treatment standards.
Floating Treatment Media gives you a lot of options that traditional systems can’t. For example, our system can:
- Fit into any existing space or water body shape
- Operate even in extreme climate or environmental conditions
- Easily be adjusted to concentrate on removing particular pollutants to suit your situation
- Work without problems on a fluctuating water level
- Increase your retention times for treatment manipulation
It’s modular properties mean that projects can be staged over more than one season.
We don’t know of any other treatment system that can be adapted to suit such a wide range of situations with so little effort.
It’s regulation commonplace these days for water treatment demands to outgrow your facilities. With our system, you can avoid the financial – and sometimes political – expense of buying more land to extend your facilities. Plus, in areas where irrigation schemes are used to dispose of treated water, the efficiency of our system in reducing nutrients in treated water means you need less land for the disposal fields.
This isn’t just theory. One local authority we serve, saved financially when we retrofitted a Floating Treatment Media to their existing pond, instead of buying land and constructing an alternative wetland system
Not only does our Floating Treatment Media require zero land use, but it also has many other environmental credentials.
- It takes no power to operate, so you don’t burn fossil fuels or use up electricity
- The manufacturing process is very low-energy since there are no refined products
- Using plants from eco-sourced seeds to harmonise with the natural vegetation
- The treatment process itself satisfies stringent water quality consent requirement, while reducing or eliminating the need for chemical dosing
For current QLD Government Department of Environment and Science guidelines please visit their website.
Become a distributor
Becoming a distributor for Atlan Floating Wetlands offers an exciting opportunity to align with a cutting-edge, eco-friendly solution that addresses water quality and habitat restoration.
Expand your product offerings and tap into a market increasingly focused on environmental stewardship and green infrastructure.
Complete the form to register your interest and we will be in touch to discuss options.
Floating Wetlands
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