The town of Franklin, Massachusetts—about 35 miles from Boston, with a population of around 30,000—is experimenting with a manufactured low-impact development system.
A local article describes the pioneering new stormwater management device as “a tree”—actually a filtration system from the company Green Street Systems, incorporating a chamber filled with a special soil mix and containing a live tree that is supposed to help filter pollutants.
The article in the local paper calls the project “the first of its kind in the country,” and it may in fact be something new for this area, although other companies sell similar types of filters, including Filterra’s Bioretention System and Deep Root’s Silva Cell. But the bigger issue is that the benefits of trees and bioretention systems for stormwater quality and quantity are finally being accepted in many different regions and by smaller municipal public works departments.
The nonprofit American Forests has been promoting trees as a stormwater tool for years (see an article from our July/August 2006 issue), and its CITYGreen GIS software helps to quantify the benefits of tree canopy in urban areas, including reduction in stormwater runoff, removal of air pollution, and carbon storage.
Some cities—Portland, Oregon, with its Green Streets program, for example, and Chicago with its goal of becoming the greenest city in America—have practically become city-sized demonstration sites, but others have been reluctant adopters. Even at StormCon last month, while many presenters were describing successful projects that incorporated myriad LID techniques, others spoke of the difficulty they still have in getting approval for such measures in parts of the country where they’re not yet widely used or well understood.
The city of Franklin, at least, seems to be onboard, with the public works director saying he’d eventually like to have “hundreds of the tree-centric stormwater drains” throughout the city.