Whether you’re in the camp of people who believe it would have changed from the city
concept regardless, or you’re in the camp who feels that what we got was a compromise
on his dream, the undeniable reality is that Walt Disney’s death in 1966 changed the
fate of Epcot.
While we would not get that city of the future, the Walt Disney Company did commit to building
Epcot for guests, and beyond that they did make an honest effort in the 70’s and 80’s
to use their Florida land to experiment with new ideas and technologies that might one
day change our society.
One of those ideas in particular was to take perhaps one of the region’s most unwanted
plants and use it as a force for good for the environment.
This is a water hyacinth.
Found in the warmer regions of the south, it is an invasive aquatic plant species that
was introduced to the United States in the late 1800’s.
These plants grow like crazy and they grow daughter plants.
That means that one single water hyacinth can end up covering up to an acre after just
one growing season.
As impressive as that growth rate is, it makes them a danger to their environment.
By growing and spreading quickly, they can end up completely covering bodies of water
they occupy, blocking the sun and negatively impacting the ecosystem for fish and other
aquatic life under that water.
At the same time they create ideal breeding conditions for insects like mosquitoes.
On top of that they also risk altering or impeding the flow of water, which in turn
can impact the environment around them.
They’re also a pain for us humans.
The heavy thick roots are easily prone to getting caught up in boat propellers and can
hamper fishing.
All in all, the water hyacinth offers little benefit but plenty of problems.
With their proliferation all sorts of ideas for getting rid of them popped up.
Chemicals were an obvious idea, but they caused issues.
They’d usually succeed at killing the plant, but then the dead plant would sink to the
bottom of the water, introducing those chemicals to the water.
Insect species were introduced in hopes that they would eat the plants, but that didn’t work.
Some of the more wild ideas included the possibility of introducing hippos to certain environments
in hopes that they’d eat the plants.
In 1975 at the National Space Technology Laboratories, NASA took a different approach to the water hyacinth.
They discovered the benefits of the pesky plant.
Through their application project, NASA discovered that the water hyacinth thrived on sewage,
absorbing wastewater pollutants.
They also found that the naturally occurring bacteria on the plant itself would help in
breaking down more complex pollutants which made it easier for the plant to absorb.
That knowledge, combined with the opportunities of scale that the plant offered by growing
so fast, meant that the water hyacinth was a potential means of naturally treating wastewater.
The findings from this project were significant enough to kick off a number of continued experiments
in the south and southeast.
Within just a few years towns and cities in Texas, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida were
setting up their own water hyacinth treatment projects to see if the plant could offer a
cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to clean their water.
It was novel and innovative and just the perfect project for Disney.
Proposed and developed by WED Enterprises in 1976, the Water Hyacinth Project was a simple concept.
They wanted to build three long narrow quarter-acre trenches that would be filled with water hyacinths
before filtering wastewater through them.
The project was approved in 1978 and sponsored by the EPA, the Department of Energy, NASA,
the state of Florida, and a few private entities including Disney themselves, the Aquamarine
Corporation, the United Gas PipeLine Company, and the Gas Research Institute.
Now those last two might sound a bit out of place, but their involvement was key to the
second half of Disney’s Water Hyacinth Project.
NASA had already proven that the plants were effective at cleaning water, but a big question
that had still remained was what to do with the plants afterwards.
Eventually they’d become too saturated and their filtering effectiveness would drop.
It was easy enough to remove those plants and let new ones quickly grow in their place,
but then what do you do with the tons of useless remains?
Ideas across the various experiments in the US ranged from grinding it up into feed for
cattle to using them for fertilizer.
However one idea that Disney explored was turning them into gas that could later be
used as a source of power.
The process was known as anaerobic digestion.
In short, the plants and other natural sludge would be put into tanks where bacteria would
go to town on it, converting it over time into gas.
That gas would be collected, and from it the methane would be extracted where it could
later be burned as a fuel source.
I actually have another video all about how Disney, with Harvest Energy, uses this process
today to convert food waste into power.
Construction for the Water Hyacinth Project began in February of 1979 and, being the simple
design it was, was finished by the beginning of that May.
Disney initially seeded the three quarter-acre channels with just 10% of the water hyacinths
needed to cover the entire area.
Just eight weeks later they were completely covered.
The facility began operation that year and… well, it worked.
It was stated that the facility could treat up to 50,000 gallons of water every day, though
it actually averaged closer to 30,000.
The harvesting of the hyacinths was staggered and took place between one to six times a month.
They were converted to gas and sent off to the Gas Research Institute for study, and
the wastewater sent through the facility was effectively cleaned up enough that the process
worked as a secondary method of treatment.
According to Disney, the system used 50% less energy than a conventional facility would
need to achieve the same results.
Disney’s Water Hyacinth Project ran successfully for over a decade before coming to an end
towards the late 1980's.
Data from the project was used across the country at other wastewater treatment facilities.
As for Disney themselves, while the concept worked, it wasn’t really the best option for them.
The amount of space that was needed to treat the water was large, and as the Walt Disney
World Resort grew dramatically in the late 80’s, Disney found themselves needing to
treat more water than ever before.
For some context, the Water Hyacinth Project treated an average of 30,000 gallons of wastewater
a day at a time in which they needed to treat over five million gallons a day.
So while the technology and methods behind it worked, they were ultimately better off
for rural areas with a lower population density and less water to treat.
Today, Disney’s wastewater treatment system is far more complex than it was in the 1970’s,
and it is capable of dealing with up to 20 million gallons per day.
Disney’s Water Hyacinth Project was not very well known.
It wasn’t front and center for guests to see and it certainly wasn’t exciting enough
to make the news.
Yet it was a new and interesting take on an old problem, and with the partnership of not
only government agencies, but also private enterprise, it acted as a decade long example
of how other communities around the world could improve.
In a way, it was a perfect example of what Walt had envisioned for EPCOT all those years ago.