A few more facts from Crapshoot:
- Pharmaceutical compounds in Canadian effluent are among the highest in the modern industrialized world.
- 80 % of Canadian coastal cities dump their sewage untreated, raw, into the ocean where the waste piles up on the ocean’s ground – In St John’s, Newfoundland, the harbour is a huge bowl which is already covered 16 feet deep in waste from the sewage pumped into the harbour. 120 million litres of sewage every day! 120,000,000 litres every 24 hours!
- 80% of Canadian sewage goes through waste water treatment. Treated water is not necessarily safe! Treated but still contaminated water goes back in our water bodies inhabited by wildlife. Even small concentrations of something might cause huge damage in fish and other wildlife. Part of this wildlife and fish gets eaten by us. It does not hit us like a bang but it might come with long-term effects on us. Therefore it’s time to seriously consider the connection between our waste and how it - steps later - could affect us.
Abby Rockefeller, President of the ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems (RILES), calls for a revolution of the system. To her the sewer system is the “peak of irrational”. She advocates a policy change that moves away from the mixing of wastes and using water as medium to carry waste towards on-site-waste-recycling and waterless meanings of dealing with waste. The main cost of the sewer is to connect the communities with pipes that transport the sewage away. On site systems do not require this infrastructure. Waste does not get spread out but is dealt with where it’s produced. If a company was unable to safely recycle its own waste or keep the material in the production loop it would not be operating. For the individual the composting toilet is an obvious solution. A composting toilet does not smell. While the solids, human excrements and kitchen waste, are composted by microbial and earth worms in a container in the basement of the building, any water goes through to a separate container for use as grey water. The compost from the solids is safe to handle, comes without health concern, smells and looks like soil.
I just found on the RILES website a post by Abby about the sewer, also under consideration of the septic system: http://www.riles.org/musings49.htm
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