Greenest City – Rainwater Harvesting System
In July we worked with Greenest City to build a rain water harvesting system. Greenest City is an award-winning charitable organization that grows local organic food, youth leaders and healthy, sustainable communities with a focus on Toronto’s Parkdale-High Park neighbourhood.
We facilitated the building of a rammed earth bag support structure (pad) for the new rain water harvesting cistern. The challenge was to reduce the carbon footprint of a project that, if conventionally built, would have required several tons of concrete and steel rebar to construct the pad. Instead, we proposed a rammed earth bag construction, a technique from the natural building world.
The cistern pad, as built by our crew with help from the community, is constructed using tamped bags of 1/4 stone. A small amount of concrete parging was added to the exterior of the pad to provide a finished look. The completed project will be used for the HOPE community garden, and is supplied with water harvested from the adjoining building’s roof.
