History

 

Humans have made a mission of destroying wetlands for agricultural and housing land due to their rich and fertile soils and their locations. (For more on loss of wetland habitats see Animals).  

 For centuries natural wetlands have been used as disposal sites for residential, small settlement and industrial waste. Wetlands are well suited to remediate large quantities of waste due to there ability to retain nutrients, capture sediments, and provide the varied environmental conditions that allow bacteria to thrive and breakdown pollutants exhibiting few short-term deleterious effects. The long-term effects of the waste influent on natural systems however have shown to be dramatic, and irreversibly change wetlands that have been used extensively. Shifting the nutrient regimes the influent has drastically altered the species diversity, and the additional liquid has changed the hydrology of the natural wetlands. Natural wetlands systems are far too complex for us to fully understand the effects of having waste dumped into them, and creating a management plan for the use of natural systems as a wastewater treatment alternative is not realistic. 

The first time that wetlands were realized as a system that could be emulated by human design, and utilized for effective remediation of effluent was in Germany in 1952 by Sindel at the Max Plank Institute of Plon. The first full-scale application was in 1977 at Othfresen in Germany to remediate civil wastewater.

Since the 1970s constructed wetlands have been explored and analyzed by many countries for many possible applications. They have been shown to be a versatile and cost-effective alternative to more traditional wastewater treatment methods or as an addition to them as the final treatment of the effluent before being discharged in to water bodies.

Constructed wetlands offer a great range of flexibility and their function can be modulated to optimize their operation to suit the proposed influent. This control over the functionality of the constructed wetland allows designers to create the most advantageous conditions for remediation of the influent by selecting appropriate substrates, vegetation, hydraulic pathways and retention time, dimensions, and site. The artificial nature of the constructed wetland system also offers the ability to precisely monitor the performance of the system.