City of South Miami is Protecting the Biscayne Bay with Stormwater Filters
Emilio Lopez
The City of South Miami is addressing stormwater pollution and protecting the Biscayne Bay by implementing SOP Technologies Patented Stormwater Filters, and we recently gathered data about the performance of the filters.
Data: Pollution prevention in South Miami
SOP Technologies and the environmental nonprofit Send It 4 The Sea went to an area of South Miami to measure the pollution prevented by 19 of the SOP Technologies stormwater filters. Data were collected on 6/17/2020, a couple of days after the streets were cleaned on 6/15/2020. 35 pounds of leaves, trash and debris were collected in front of the stormwater filters.
Items blocked by 19 stormwater filters
48 pieces of hard plastics (such as plastic bottles and lids)
32 pieces of soft plastics (such as plastic bags and wrappers)
5 cigarette butts
2 pieces of glass (such as bottles and glass objects)
32 pieces of paper (such as wrappers and paper objects)
13 pieces of metal (such as aluminum cans and metal objects)
1 piece of Styrofoam
All 19 stormwater filters had leaves in front of them.
LOCAL SOlutions to Address a Global Crisis
An all-too-common issue facing cities in Florida, and around the world, is that pollution such as leaves, plastics, and Styrofoam enter the stormwater systems and discharges directly into local waterways. From there, the pollution often travels far into the ocean. A 2015 report estimated that 8 million metric tonnes (8.8 million US tons) of plastic pollution enters the world’s oceans every year. In addition to being an ecological problem, stormwater pollution causes street flooding and is expensive to clean once the debris has entered stormwater drainage pipes.
The Biscayne Bay is essential to Florida’s economy, and efforts such as the Biscayne Bay Marine Health Summit and the Miami-Dade County Biscayne Bay Task Force have formed to highlight and address issues relating to the Bay. Implementing stormwater filters is an important and cost-efficient way that South Miami is contributing to the solution.