VATIS UPDATE Article

BioFiltro, Chile, offers an alternative: spraying the wastewater into giant bins filled with earthworms. Fetzer Vineyards, the United States, will use the process to treat 100% of its wastewater. The industrious worms are expected to clean the water just as well but in only four hours. They require almost no electricity, and the only byproduct is worm excrement – also known as castings – which can be returned to the vineyard as a nutritious fertilizer. “This system is using nature. It’s using worms and microbes to treat all of our winery wastewater,” said Josh Prigge, at Fetzer.

BioFiltro has begun to install its system at Fetzer, which expects to have it fully operational later this year, in time for the 2016 grape harvest. Fetzer and BioFiltro declined to disclose the system’s cost. Fetzer has long been a sustainability leader in the wine industry, having converted its entire operation to use renewable energy sources such as solar, for example, back in 1999. It also recently became the largest winery certified as a B Corporation, a process requiring Fetzer to meet rigorous environmental and social standards.

BilFiltro designs different worm and bacteria recipes, which depend partly on the types of worms that can thrive in local conditions, to treat a particular type of wastewater. Large solids in the wastewater collect on the wood shavings and are then consumed by the worms. Microscopic solids are consumed by the bacteria, both on the wood shavings and in the worms’ digestive tracts. Fetzer will have three treatment boxes, each 36-feet wide, 200-feet long and 6-feet deep. An estimated 100m worms in total, mostly the common California red worms, will be on duty.