Students and community members gathered in the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies Saturday for an open house of the Living Machine.

The Living Machine is “an ecologically engineered system that combines elements of conventional technology with the purification processes of natural wetland ecosystems to treat and then recycle the AJLC’s waste water,” according to the Living Machine’s brochure. A series of water tanks and purifiers takes the human waste from the AJLC toilets, using microbes to clean it to “gray water,” which is then recycled back into the toilets and the lawn-watering systems.

The water, student attendant Andrew Decoriolis said, is actually clean enough for drinking, but requires a certain certification from the EPA that the living machine currently does not have.

Currently the Living Machine processes 500 gallons of waste per day. However, Decoriolis said, the machine is capable of processing up to 2000 gallons per day. Students and faculty are attempting to connect the machine to Harkness and Fairchild dormitories to increase the flow. Decoriolis said that pipelines to Fairchild are already in place. A student committee has been created to examine the feasibility of this proposal.

Decoriolis said that the machine is important for the concept of sustainability.

“The technology for this machine is a few years old. The new systems [in the Southwest] can treat 50,000 gallons a day, which can easily take care of an entire city. And there would be no waste discharge.

“It’s not much more expensive either. It pays for itself in its 10 to 15-year lifespan.”

Visitors are led through a series of stations that explained the Living Machine system. Some stations included microscopes that examined water from each of the Living Machine’s purifying tanks. Another station had five jars of water, one from each of the tanks, that displayed the purity of the water from each tank. Visitors determined which water was cleanest and which was dirtiest.

But perhaps one of the largest draws to the event was the exchange of “donations.” Visitors to the AJLC who used the bathrooms over the week were invited to take tickets which they could exchange at the open house for humus and brownies. In advocating sustainable resource use, living machine inventor John Todd had said that “waste equals food.”

Both College-associated visitors and out-of-towners on tours of Oberlin were present at the open house.

Students and faculty are still encouraged to donate to the living machine.