Optimized and tuneable green infrastructure to protect natural water bodies from stormwater pollution

We can offer significant experience in enhancing green infrastructure to improve its water cleaning performance for protection of natural water bodies.  Our work thus far has included work on Glasgow City’s Avenues program, a £115M program to bring green infrastructure for water management into the city.  This program is designed not only for flood protection, but also to protect the River Clyde from urban stormwater pollutants. 

Sustainable urban drainage systems are a form of green infrastructure that provides a key role in protecting water bodies from stormwater pollutants.  We can explore how their soil and aggregate composition influences and drives key geochemical and microbiological processes that are responsible for water cleaning.  Pollutant removal can be maximised using different soil and aggregate types.  For example, our laboratory based studies showed how natural weathering of certain aggregates generates a surface patterned with new nano and micro sized mineral phases, displaying very high surface area driving enhanced pollutant scavenging.  Moreover, we hypothesise soil and aggregate mixes can be tuned to optimize microbial community structure and syntrophic relationships that are vital in pollution degradation in these systems.  Again, the compositions of soils and aggregates chosen will select for specific microbial community assemblages, enabling community composition to be tuneable and therefore optimized for pollutant removal.