Poloboy

Normally, like most other people, I do my business on the toilet and get on with my day, never thinking about where my crap goes after I flush the toilet. If it's a legendary no-wiper I might give myself a pat on the back (after washing my hands) and continue my day with an extra spring in my step, forgetting about it 2 minutes later.

Not anymore.

Today in my second year microbiology class we learned about sewage systems, and the importance of microorganisms like bacteria in sanitizing the sewage before it's pumped back into the environment.

Sewage treatment is broken down into three steps. It's standard to do primary and secondary treatment (only a handful of cities in North America also do tertiary). Primary is physical treatment, which means passing the water through a screen with small holes to stop all the big pieces of poo, limbs, needles, and dead cats getting through. Primary treatment also includes sedimentation, which is letting other big chunks settle to the bottom of a tank and letting the fluid on top pass on. Secondary treatment is when all of the disgusting organic compounds (e.g. body fluids, pathogenic bacteria etc.) actually get removed.

The scary part, is that I also learned my city only does primary treatment. In fact, it only does part of primary treatment. Our sewage is run through a physical screen once and then is flushed out onto the beach right by my house. I always thought this sewage drain was pretty disgusting. Little did I know my city skips the process that removes 90-95% of the organic material from sewage. So much for skimboarding at that beach ever again.

Do you know what your city does? Do you know the extent of its sewage treatment? Never before did I give this a moment of thought. Now that I know about it, I'm thoroughly disgusted. The BC provincial government just announced they're buying something like 50 hybrid cars for government personnel to drive, to show some leadership in the community for environmental concern.

Leaders in environmental concern? I call bullshit.

k925

I might be grossed out too, but realistically, how many gallons of your friends' and neighbors' sewage go into the ocean a day?

Keeping that number in mind, how many gallons of salt water are in the ocean at any given time (then again, how much of that "water" is actually excrement of various sealife)?

My point is that your city's sewage is probably heavily diluted before it even reaches your toes on the beach (unless, of course, you're playing around in the direct flow of the sewage).

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Redlemon

I'm an environmental engineer (air quality). I once did an audit of four wastewater treatment plants in one day. This was one of the worst days of my life. I skipped my last couple of hours of work so that I could go home and shower, and I could smell the stench coming out of my hair in the shower. The worst room was about 98% humid, I don't remember which step it was (part of the secondary phase), but nasty nasty nasty.

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Charlatan

That is still no excuse for dumping what amounts to raw sewage into the environment.

We have technology to clean our waste by product and cities that fail to use this should be forced to... I know in Toronto we have some very thorough sewage treatment going on. The one problem we did have was that when our storm drains overflowed (during particulary high rainfall) it would mix with our sewage drains and that would in turn, flow directly into the lake.

When this would occur the inevitable beach closings would start happening across waterfront.

They recently build a massive catch basin down by the lake to hold this overflow until it could be properly treated.

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lurkette

This might be a bit of a threadjack, but what do you know about composting toilets? Really, when you think about the importance of water for our survival, it makes no sense to dump our waste into our most valuable resource, treatment or no treatment. It just seems (pardon the pun) wasteful.

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tspikes51

I don't really understand it either. I wonder if we could do it with compressed air.

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spived2

I don't think that dumping sewage into the ocean has much of an effect at all. There are millions of microorganisms that live in the ocean that will help break it down quickly.

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Poloboy

100 million litres. That's a little more than 25 million gallons I guess. My friends and neighbours and I and the other 300,000 people in this small/medium sized city flush 25 million gallons into the ocean daily.




Spived 2, the many microbes in the ocean don't really solve the problem. There certainly are billions of microorganisms in the ocean that can decompose an incredible variety of disgusting things. The ocean's about 4 degrees celsius though, and most of these decomposers thrive at optimal temperatures of 25+ degrees celsius. At 4 C, their metabolism is SLOW. At a certain point they won't be able to keep up with the crap we throw at them. The repercussions certainly won't be seen for at least a generation, but I think they will surface at some point, and it won't be pretty. A lot of the bacteria that breakdown specific organic components of sewage are obligate aerobes as well, which means they can't live in the ocean, there isn't enough oxygen in the water.

It's like arguing that trees naturally grow and spread, so mass clearcutting is ok because they can grow back. In both cases it's not quite that simple.

I don't know anything about composting toilets lurkette, what are they?

Blackthorn

I live directly downstream from Pittsburgh. I have a general ionics water softening system and and and and he says...yes... a reverse osmosis filter for fresh clean drinking water.

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Manuel Hong

ew.


Poloboy, thanks for sharing. I'm going to find out what our treatment plant does...it's right down the street. ew. yuck.

I can't believe they were pumping that shit at your beach. Mother ocean is not capable of dealing with that much work in the "in box".
Lurkette, as soon as I own my own home, I'm getting one!

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lurkette

When I build my wattle-&-daub bungalow, I'm getting one of these: http://www.envirolet.com/scienbehen.html

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Manuel Hong

Lurkette, thanks for the link. I'll bookmark it for the future.

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betula

I'm in an Environmental class right now, and we talked about our city's (Buffalo) system. Basically, it is a combined storm/sewer, and minimal amounts of rain will overflow the system. I think the professor said that between 100-120 days a year the system overflows and dumps completely untreated waste water directly into Lake Erie. I'm sure this is happening in a LOT of cities.

Supple Cow

Here in NYC, this problem was very public a few decades ago because the Hudson River was like a big festering dump that ran right along the city. I know for a fact that we have both primary and secondary treatment here today (I forget if there is tertiary), but I recall all too much of all my intro level environmental science classes and the class I took on the Hudson River environment. It's more than sad and gross that it never occurs to people that our shit (and trash) has to go somewhere and that there's a whole lot of it: I remember reading about a study (I think it was in the UK) on the effects of estrogen in the water supply on male fertility. Apparently, there are so many women using hormone treatments (for contraception) that the estrogen, which isn't removed through the sewage treatment, effectively sterilizes all the male fish in water bodies into which sewage treatment plants discharge. It causes such great deformations in the sperm of the fish that they are unable to reproduce. At the time I heard about this (a couple of years ago), the jury was still out on whether the gradual increase in sperm abnormalities in human males in the last couple of generations could be attributed to this effect.

Keep in mind, this is just what is already being studied. Imagine all of the other things we let into our bodies constantly - through the air, water and foods - that we have little or no control over as individuals.

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Manuel Hong

Whoooosh. The lack of responsibility humanity shows today is appalling!

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Demeter

Everyone quit pooing! You're damaging the environment.

Its head reeling to thing about the amout of sewage humans must make in a single day. Ick!

basmoq

my city has a level three treatment facility before the water goes into the St. Joe River. I took a tour once, it was really cool

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Glava

There is a sewage treatment plant right next to my university. When the wind blows the wrong way, it smells shitty.

alicat

Not meaning to sound superior (no pun meant), but Michigan is quite a unique state in the lower 48 in that we are basically surrounded on three sides by 4 of the 5 "Great Lakes". O'kay it gets a bit conviluted when you take into consideration that our Upper Penninsula is seperated from the mainland and therefore only has shores on Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. Yes, there are a couple other "great" lakes in the states but I don't think anyone can argue that Michigan is surrounded by the most (with the exception being Lake Ontario).

We rely on a great amount of our living water on the said "Great Lakes". Namely Michigan, Huron and Erie for the main body of our state. Lake Superior and Michigan for the U.P. (Upper penninsula of Michigan).

Quite frankly, it pisses me off that our drinking and living waters (meaning 3 of the great lakes that surround us, the lower pennisula) are being polluted by huge cities like Chicago and New York. I am by no means saying that the cities in Michigan haven't contributed to the problem, they have. But no one, again, can argue the fact that Chicago and New York are two of the largest cities in the U.S.. They both have a shore on one of the "Great Lakes". I don't know the numbers but can only assume, given the sheer amount of humanity that lives in those two cities, that they both contribute a majority of the waste that feeds into the "Great Lakes" that I rely on for my fresh water for drinking, cooking and bathing as most Americans do from their city water source.

The Great lakes are also polluted with 100+ Ivasive species due in no small part to ships that have come up the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Erie Canal, then onto the lakes. That, of corse, is the fault of our politicians (and those of the other states around the Great Lakes) that have allowed the ship traffic to continue. Yes, I realize that both seemed needed at the time and allowed great advances in trade, but the need for them has long since deminished.

Alot of people (that we elected into power) need to do some serious thinking about environmental concerns before even one measly thing will change. I'm not holding my breath. I am however, having second thoughts everytime I drink water out of the tap...

Ali

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fulltiltgonzo

I have my own, private sewage treatment facility. It's called a septic system. It consists of a 1000-gallon tank, a sand filter and an absorbtion bed. It cost me $4500 back in 1992 and I built it myself with the help of a friend with a backhoe.

It's been inspected by the state (NY) Health Department and other than pumping it every 2-3 years, it doesn't cost me anything.

I will say the stench when I'm getting it pumped is pretty nasty, however. And what they say about corn is really true - even a septic can't render it unrecognizable!

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kulrblind

Poloboy (and other interested Canadians): Check out the SLDF's National Sewage Report Card for more info on the various cities and their (often lack of) sewage treatment performance.

As an environmental economist, I deal with similar issues all the time. Also, living in a harbour city that's currently improving to secondary (yeee-uck!) treatment, it's in the news quite a bit.

Samalie

I'm actually on City Council for my little city in Canada.

I just recently went through our whole waste treatment facility/process.

Bottom line, the water discharged at the end is cleaner than the water we pickup from our source lake. We're actually looking at discharging directly into our intake system, the end product is that clean.

Sammy

betula

alicat, I'm originally from Michigan as well, and this is my first year away from the state. I know just what you mean. On the West side of the state, we'd often hear news stories on how medical waste, such as syringes and things, were washing up on shore in Holland, Muskegon, and other coastal towns. They claimed that Milwaukee was responsible. There are so many big cities on these coasts, and a lot of them dump some very hazardous stuff right in the water.

Luckily there are many other bodies of water in the inland of Michigan that can be better controlled for pollution and will provide good drinking water. Unfortunately, they often are not controlled well.

snowy

Where I live in Oregon we get about 40% of our water from resevoirs in the Coast Range and about 60% of our water directly from the Willamette River. However, we are far upstream of any major urban areas (Eugene is upstream of us, but they keep things pretty clean, considering), and so the level of pollution in the Willamette at our point in the river is certainly not what it is at Portland or even Salem.

The City of Corvallis conducts both primary and secondary treatment. Water is then pumped back into the river downstream of the collection point. The water returned to the river at that point is cleaner than the water taken out to be processed. The sludge taken out from the water in the primary stage is then used as fertilizer in local farm fields.
My uncle used to be the environmental engineer who oversaw the water treatment and wastewater treatment facilities in Orlando, FL and is now responsible for the design of many wastewater facilities here in the PacNW. I know way more about wastewater than I probably should because of him, but then he is also the one who made me more enviromentally conscious--and that's always a good thing.

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ironmaiden7o7

This is something I never really thought about before, I have to do some research on it. Interesting though.

n0nsensical

In LA county, Hyperion (for the city of LA) and the Joint Water Pollution Control Plant (for a lot of the rest of the county) serve about 7 million people out of 10 million and do secondary treatment. Another 1.5 million or more have full treatment done with the output recycled (though nobody's drinking that as far as I know, it's used for irrigation, refining oil, etc.). I went on a tour of the Detroit sewage treatment plant once, which was pretty interesting; I should tour the ones here too.

Anyway, most bodies of water in the US are probably a LOT cleaner now than they were 50 to 150 years ago.

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streak_56

I live outside of calgary, so we have a sewage tank that everything goes into, its not as bad as I thought it would be. It causes the grass to grow hella fast. But thats all I know of. Also, we get our water from a well.... but I don't have any worries of it being "contaminated." Though it is high in iron.... thats the only downside. Break out the water softener Ma, were doing the laundry.

Poloboy

Thanks for the link kulrblind. It looks like Sierra confirmed how horrible Victoria is. Samalie, according to Sierra's national review, Edmonton's got a pretty awesome treatment system. Maybe you should come sit on the Victoria council It sounds like a lot of the pollution into the great lakes is coming from Montreal, as well. (No big surprise).