Using an information processing architecture as an aid to optimising technology choice for faecal wastes and domestic waste water:
Part I – Encapsulating Nature

Introduction

In a 1983 book titled “Sanitation and disease: health aspects of excreta and wastewater management” published by the World Bank the authors reviewed the history of sewerage and concluded that: “These practices are not especially clever, nor logical, nor completely effective – and it is not necessarily what would be done today if these same countries had the chance to start again”. Today sewerage treatment stations are more complex so they are a little more effective, but not much else has changed. Indeed, Steve Couper a past president of Water New Zealand notes as recently as July 2013 that “Surely a shift in thinking from energy hungry wastewater plants to one of opportunity for resource recovery needs to be the future focus of our sector, along with looking at the whole environment....” (Water; July 2013, P.2). The fact that there has been little change in the industry in the 30 years between these two observations points to structural issues that stifle critique of the current system. It follows that a methodology that steps outside the industry and can critique its internal functioning is needed.

As a contribution to this, it is argued here that Nature can be encapsulated within an information processing structure (Structure). As the behavioural characteristics of the underlying laws and processes pre-existed humans, then any use of this Structure is also outside all human constructs, and this includes the industry and all known technologies. It follows that using such a Structure means that we can approach any optimisation question without pre-conceived notions arising from the human domain.

An information processing architecture takes this Nature-based Structure and adds to it: considerations of its lower and upper boundaries; and the manner of human interaction with it. The lower boundary is argued to be best located at the ‘chemistry conjunction’; this being where physics meets biology and all analysis systems are linked – particularly useful in the waste water industry are mass balance and thermodynamics. The upper mathematical boundary of Nature’s Structure is argued to be best located in the mathematics on the Nature side of the Nature/human interface, thereby giving Nature a clear voice. In contrast, the physical boundaries of the architecture need to be located to include human environmental impacts (read receiving waters). A second physical boundary based on a technology is useful if the system contains several technologies operating in series and/or parallel.

Sustainability considerations attach very easily to Nature’s mathematical Structure. This is possible because the zeros that are implicit in sustainable use of resources are synonymous with the mathematical procedure of minimisation. Consequently, sustainability can express as an initial narrowing of the focus of a Structure, and become visible as a ‘Beacon’ against which each technology can be measured as to the degree to which it meets this perfection. Sustainability questions therefore reduce to consideration of the location of the boundaries of the architecture and the manner of human interaction with it.

This paper details the architecture and its boundaries while Part II of this series looks at human complexity (Chapman, 2014a). The linkages between the two (considered to be tools that aid the optimisation process) are discussed in Chapman (2014c).