Kailash Ecovillage
Kailash Ecovillage
Location: Portland, Oregon
Kailash Ecovillage, is a repurposed apartment complex, now outfitted in some units with a compost toilet and sustainable practices, and filled with a community of like-minded approach towards sustainability and the environment.
Kailash Ecovillage is known for its sustainability practices. They are known for creating their own fertilizer. They have a process where both urine and human excrement are utilized in a safe and sustainable way. They work on creating as self-sufficient of a garden as they can with what they have on the site.
They currently have many projects in the works:
- Rainwater harvesting project: divert all the roof stormwater from the sanitary sewer to on-site rain gardens. In a following project, Kailash Ecovillage was able to capture 100% of the driveway stormwater with three grate grains installed in the driveways allowing them to capture another 200,000 gallons per year, which will be cleaned in the rain gardens, all of which is helping replenish the aquifer from which the communities on-site well draws water from.
- Ecosan: This has allowed the Kailash ecovillage, as stated above, to process human excreta into sanitized compost and urine. This helps us to build better topsoil and has allowed our gardens to become self-sufficient in nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and other trace elements.
- Depave: They worked on depaving their existing parking lot, this project worked on taking away the asphalt equivalent to 12 parking spaces, totaling 4,500 square feet of asphalt, to help create a new garden space.
Future Projects:
- Furthering the rainwater harvesting project
- Solar thermal energy harvesting: using solar thermal vacuum tuber to collect heat in water and pump it to all residential units, by doing so could potentially help preheat the supply entering each residential water heater as well as heat air for residential units
Places like Kailash Ecovillage are looking for the next things when it comes to sustainability in everyday life uses. This is an incredible journey where they are striving to continue bettering the conditions of the site that they live on, and their sustainability and self sufficiency.
I found the Kailash ecovillage to be super interesting. Some of the practices that were covered in the documentary seen in class are really out there, but essential to creating the sort of self sustained environment that is so interesting and important to the development of this at large culturally [urine and feces recycling especially]. The thing that i found interesting about the community the most is its leadership's ability to convince me of the normality and importance of these practices. I believe that an informed leadership is key to the convincing of others who may not be so immediately likeminded on implementing these sort of sustainable practices in their life, thus making our communities at large more sustainable in the face of our modern world.
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