And, as if by magic (a catchphrase that will only mean something to someone who grew up in Britain in the 1970s and watched the marvellous children’s show Mr. Benn), the Associated Press nicely backs up my op-ed in today’s New York Times, that wastewater treatment doesn’t work as well as we assume it does. For a start, to paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, civilized people should think of a better way to deal with their filth than polluting their drinking water with it. Also, it’s ludicrous in these times of expensive artificial fertilizers and diminishing phosphorus reserves to chuck all the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium away. And, as the AP article persuasively demonstrates, often the system just doesn’t work. Last weekend, 890, 000 gallons of raw sewage and stormwater “spilled” – actually, was deliberately discharged – into San Francisco Bay because its “World War II-era” wastewater treatment didn’t have the storage capacity to hold it. On average, raw sewage “spills” into the Bay five times a day. EPA stimulus money – $283 million – for sewage system upgrades falls a little short of the $1 billion it’s estimated the system needs. “There’s a lot of effort that goes into maintenance,” said a water board official, “but one can only put enough Band-Aids on something for a time. At some point you’ve got to do a full remodel.”
Or, you can redesign the whole damn paradigm. I drove down to London from Yorkshire (hence the Woolley, England dateline on the Times op-ed – it’s just off Junction 38 of the M1, for the curious) this week listening to an audio version of The Girl Who Played with Fire by the Swedish crime writer Stieg Larsson. I’ve never been to Sweden, but I think I’m going to have to. Not only will they be running taxis in Stockholm on human shit-derived biogas; but they have urine separation toilets in Stockholm suburbs. But the most intriguing thing about Swedes – and other Scandinavians, I suspect – is that they routinely go up to summer cabins and routinely find nothing weird about using composting toilets. They have no choice, of course: There are no sewer lines in remote areas. But there’s no talk of septic tanks. In the book, when the heroine heads up to a summer cabin, the composting toilet is mentioned completely casually. No big deal. When people in the wastewater industry say that no-one wants to abandon the current way of doing things, that there won’t be a revolution, I think of those composting toilets and think, people can get used to anything when they have to. Like the little Norwegian girl someone told me about, who had grown up with a composting toilet in her house – where the shit drops onto ash or something similar, and there is no water involved – and when she went to kindergarten the first time, she was horrified by the flush toilet. “She could see shit floating in the water and she was used to a black hole.”
I don’t think that there’s going to be massive revolutionary retro-fit of the wastewater treatment system any time soon, and of course it’s the best option so far for city life and is unbeatable for separating us from our toxic waste. But surely we can tinker.
I enjoyed the column in the NYT, and the separation toilets do truly sound like a good idea. But what is the individual citizen to do? If I put one (or more) in my house, what would we do with the nicely separated contents? I grow some vegetables but in a city plot (Northwest Washington DC) I would have more than I could handle, with a family of four.
As an aside I read your book The Big Necessity and found it “abfab”. The only problem being that most the changes require a cultural shift. My wife is very tempted by the thought of the five thousand dollar fancy Japanese toilet but in these dicey economic times old fashioned TP seems a bit easier on the wallet