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ELGIN, IL - If you want clean streams, you need clean streets. That's the message Brian Giles, sweeper product manager for Elgin sweeper, shared with the municipal officials and consulting engineers who comprise the DuPage River Salt Creek Workgroup of The Conservation Foundation. The Chicago-area organization focuses on helping local governments understand and apply best practices in environmental stewardship.
Giles made the connection between street pollution and surface water pollution in his June 30 presentation to the workgroup in a meeting held at city hall in Elmhurst, Ill., a Chicago suburb. He is a frequent speaker on environment protection topics to public and private conservation groups.
During the presentation, Giles described a variety of street surface pollutants that enter the sewers and, eventually, the waterways, paying particular attention to silt as a menace to clean streams. He said silt is inorganic matter less than 80 microns in diameter that tends to remain suspended in solution and is difficult to remove from surface water.
"Eighty percent of silt, or debris that could become silt, is located within several feet of the gutter," Giles noted. "It may be hard to believe, but the average street has about 1,000 pounds of debris per mile. The key to preventing surface water pollution is to keep that debris from entering the storm sewers."
Giles cited data on the effectiveness of various sweeping technologies in removing silt from the streets, ranging from a low of 81 percent using standard wet dust-control mechanical sweepers, to a high of 98 percent using high efficiency regeneration sweeper technology.
