EPA Pilot Project: Save Paradise, Put Up a Parking Lot

Our modern, car-dependent culture has required us to create vast quantities of hardened paved surfaces designed to aid the process of getting from point A to any manner of point B. And once we’re there, we’ll certainly need a place to park our ride so we can go about our business.

The hydrological ramifications of all this pavement have been the focus of exploration over past years, as these hard surfaces yield some hard realities for infrastructure and natural systems alike. The water quality and water quality problems that arise are now known to dish up a nasty one-two punch.

When rain otherwise falls on natural soils, much of it will enter the soil through a process called infiltration. Some of this water will be put to use by plant life, some will be retained as soil moisture, and some will continue the downward, gravity-driven march until it hits the water table to replenish groundwater.

Paved surfaces, however, prevent this from happening. When rainfall hits a road or a parking lot, the water is unable to enter the soil, but it all has to go somewhere, and off it goes just the same, and rather quickly at that.

Public water treatment infrastructure nationwide must battle the challenge of huge volumes of water that rush all at once into storm drains and sewer systems. High volumes of water are also delivered too rapidly from hard surfaces for nearby rivers and streams to handle, causing erosion, localized flooding and ecosystem disruption.

And further, all of this water has most likely picked up some unhelpful hitchhikers in the form of sediment and various contaminants from the paved surfaces.

An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) facility in Edison, NJ, however, is putting itself in the center of the investigation and implementation of alternate and less harmful pavement approaches with a pilot project on its office parking lot.

As we learn in a press release made available at EurekAlert, an entire acre of the Edison facility’s parking lot has been replaced with a trio of differing design approaches to permeable pavement, along with nearby rain gardens designed to capture precipitation for return to the soil.

With an eye toward the eventual roll-out of appropriate urban planning technology on a national scale, the EPA will monitor the test plots over the next decade for performance and effectiveness. Follow their progress and learn more about the full spectrum of EPA's stormwater-related activities and programs at their Office of Stormwater Management Web site.

Photo courtesy of Vlastula, via Wikimedia Commons