Summit Consulting Services was one of three teams that designed and tested an in-home water and sanitation system that recycles water for use in the home. The State of Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation initiated the project to spur the development of innovative and cost effective water and sanitation systems for homes in remote Alaska villages. The Challenge focuses on decentralized water and waste water treatment, recycling and water minimization. The system was built and tested in Tok, Alaska in 2016 and 2017.
The State of Alaska is reviewing the final designs and testing results of the prototypes developed by the three teams. As of December 2018, the State of Alaska was still determining what the next steps will be, potentially including further testing in a lab or village setting.
Summit's proposed system fits within the existing house footprint and uses parts that can be configured to fit within a variety of housing types. The system is running water and sanitation system inside the home with easy hook-ups to fill water and haul waste water. The system contains a purifier to provide clean drinking water. The system reduces the amount of water hauled by cleaning and recycling water for uses such as laundry, hand washing, and showering. The system is being tested with two toilet configurations - a low flush toilet and a urine-diverting toilet.
Our Alaska Water and Sewer Challenge team offers qualifications in three key areas:
Summit Consulting Services, Inc. opened its doors at the original office location near Tok, Alaska in 1995, specializing in construction management services on force account rural Alaska public construction projects, primarily for the State of Alaska Village Safe Water (VSW) Program. Since then, Summit has expanded to offer a full range of planning, design, and construction management services, opening our Fairbanks office in 1997 and the Anchorage office in 1998.
AGNEW::BECK is a multidisciplinary consulting firm based in Anchorage, Alaska. We are skilled in analysis, policy development, planning, public engagement, and project implementation. Since 2002, we have helped our clients strategically respond to challenges and opportunities to achieve their goals. Our team is committed to effective and efficient project management. We work to build healthy communities locally, regionally and statewide.
“Engage, Plan, Implement” is our approach to helping people, places and organizations get beyond ideas and issues, and get into making things happen.
Re-Locate is a collective of immersive ethnographic artists and transdisciplinary collaborators co-creating projects, platforms, and relationships with Kivalina friends and partners that support Kivalina’s long-standing plans for village relocation and expansion. Re-Locate projects make the economic, political, and environmental issues underlying relocation visible to global audiences; support community discussion and exchange; locate, connect, and educate new relocation partners; create spaces where people from displaced communities can share original media and ideas about local ways of life; develop platforms for managing local to global networks of support; host collaborative design processes that synthesize project knowledge into culturally specific planning and architecture; contribute to global efforts that are shaping the discourse on climate displacement; and develop practices for working in partnership with climate-displaced communities worldwide.
The Climate Foundation is dedicated to educating and empowering people to halt global warming in our lifetime.
The University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, is an education and research centre for renewable resources. With its wide range of areas of expertise, BOKU's goal is to contribute significantly to the protection of precious renewable resources for future generations. With a connection between natural sciences, engineering and economics, BOKU aims to deepen knowledge about using natural resources ecologically, economically and sustainably.