Fw: #645: Excrement Happens, Part 2

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>=======================Electronic Edition========================

>. .

>. RACHEL'S ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #645 .

>. ---April 8, 1999--- .

>. HEADLINES: .

>. EXCREMENT HAPPENS -- PART 2 .

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>

>EXCREMENT HAPPENS -- PART 2

>

>Continuing from last week, we are retelling the history of the

>management of human excrement as originally narrated by Abby A.

>Rockefeller.[1] Where we have added new facts to Ms.

>Rockefeller's original history, they appear inside square

>brackets.

>

> * * *

>

>To recap where we are: Cities began to provide running water into

>homes in the early 19th century. Water piped into homes had to be

>piped out again, often into open sewer ditches running in the

>streets. Outbreaks of cholera followed. A debate ensued: should

>sewage be transported back to farms, where the nutrients had

>originated, or should it be disposed of by dumping it into bodies

>of water? Although many cities for a time transported sewage to

>farms, by 1920 most sewage was being piped directly into bodies

>of water. This was a crucial choice.

>

>Once the network of sewer pipes began to grow, industry saw these

>public pipes as a cheap place to dump industrial wastes. As a

>result, corporations began to dump all manner of toxicants into

>the nutrient-rich sewage stream. This was another crucial choice.

>Once they were mixed together, nutrients and industrial poisons

>could not be separated at any reasonable price. Therefore the

>whole mess became a toxic waste disposal problem and excrement

>lost its value as a fertilizer. Dumping it into water bodies

>accelerated.

>

>By the 1950s, most of the nation's waterways were badly

>contaminated with a combination of nutrients and toxicants. This

>gave rise to a demand for treatment of waste prior to disposal.

>Pipes that used to carry toxic sewage into streams and oceans now

>began to carry it into centralized " wastewater treatment plants "

>or " publicly owned treatment works " (POTWs).

>

>Wastewater treatment plants remove the solids and some of the

>chemicals, creating a black, mud-like " sludge " in the process.

>It's a trade-off: improved wastewater treatment means cleaner

>discharge water but it also means more sludge and worse sludge

>(more toxic). Now a new, and truly intractable, problem appears:

>what to do with mountains of toxic sludge?

>

>Communities with access to the ocean began dumping sludge there.

>New York dumped its sewage sludge 12 miles offshore; when that

>place developed obvious contamination problems, the dumping was

>moved to a spot 106 miles offshore, where, to no one's surprise,

>contamination soon developed.

>

>The use of water to carry sewage, and the use of centralized

>wastewater treatment plants, had great political appeal for

>several reasons. Most political authorities tend to favor

>centralized solutions because they basically don't trust people

>to handle their own problems. Secondly, as we have noted,

>industry needed a cheap place to dispose of its wastes. [in 1997,

>according to the Congressional Research Service, industry " dumped

>240 million pounds of wastes with hazardous components " into

>municipal sewers.[2]] Third, and perhaps most important, laying

>sewer pipes and building centralized sewage treatment plants is

>extremely costly and engineering firms receive 20% of the initial

>cost. [between 1970 and 1993, the federal government appropriated

>$69.5 billion for sewage construction projects. The Congressional

>Research Service recently estimated that between now and the year

>2016 (17 years), the federal government will spend another $126

>billion on sewage projects.[2] These are serious amounts of

>money.] Only the Federal Highway Administration [and the

>military] spend more public money on construction. [if even a

>small fraction of this sewer money is kicked back at election

>time by consultants, lawyers, investment bankers and engineering

>firms, it can go a long way toward keeping the present crop of

>politicians in office.]

>

>In the 1970s, many environmentalists and public health officials

>favored centralized sewage treatment because it seemed to offer

>an improvement over dumping raw wastes into waterways. The Clean

>Water Act of 1977 was essentially a sewering act. Everyone was

>then locked into centralized wastewater treatment systems.

>

>In 1988, Congress discovered that sludge dumping in the oceans

>was harming marine life, and the practice was banned as of 1992.

>This created a massive problem for American cities: [11.6 billion

>pounds of sludge (that's the dry weight, not counting the water

>it contains[3]) has to go somewhere, year after year.]

>

>At that moment, EPA decided that the U.S. now needs to mimic 100

>generations of successful farmers in Asia, returning human

>excrement to farmland.

>

>However, EPA has overlooked two important differences between

>modern sewage sludge and traditional " night soil " (unadulterated

>human waste):

>

>1) Most of the nitrogen in human waste is in the urine and is

>water-soluble, so it is not captured in the sludge. Therefore, if

>sludge is going to substitute for commercial fertilizer, you have

>to use a lot of it to get enough nitrogen. And (2) when you add a

>lot of sludge to soil, you are also adding a lot of toxic metals

>and a rich (though very poorly understood) mixture of organic

>chemicals and, very likely, radioactive wastes as well.

>

>EPA has addressed the toxic metals by telling farmers to add lime

>to their soil along with the sewage sludge, to prevent the soil

>from becoming acidic. If soil turns acidic, then toxic metals

>begin to move around, either leaching down into groundwater or

>moving upward into the crops (which, by definition, are part of

>some food chain). If soils are alkaline (the opposite of acidic),

>the metals move more slowly.

>

>[What EPA has overlooked is the fact that ordinary rain is

>slightly acidic, not counting the excess acidity provided by

> " acid rain. " Normal rain drops falling through the atmosphere

>dissolve small amount of carbon dioxide, forming carbonic acid.

>Normal rain has a pH of 5.6 whereas 7 is neutral. Therefore, if

>soils are not kept alkaline by the regular addition of lime,

>sooner or later normal rain will begin to leach excess metals out

>of many soils. The only way to prevent this is to keep the excess

>metals out of soils in the first place.]

>

>In sum, plowing sewage sludge into soils is essentially

>guaranteed to harm many of those soils as time passes. [see REHW

>#561.] [As we know from the ancients who poisoned their soils

>with irrigation salts, a nation that poisons its farmland is a

>nation that doesn't have a long-term future.]

>

>A series of bad decisions made during this century has brought us

>to an impasse: sewage sludge is unmanageable because you can't

>know from day to day what is going to be in it, and so you cannot

>monitor its contents.[4] (Even if you could manage the scientific

>problems inherent in monitoring an unknown mixture of unknown

>substances, as a practical matter there isn't any government

>agency with enough staff to monitor the nation's sludge.)

>

>Therefore -- as heroic a task as this may seem -- it is time to

>re-think centralized water-carriage sewage treatment systems. The

>present systems were not designed to produce useable products and

>therefore the DESIGN of present systems is the root of the

>problem.

>

>Three policy goals are needed: (1) Sewer avoidance (stay off or

>get off water-carriage, centralized sewer systems). (2) Promote

>low-cost, on-site resource recycling technologies, such as

>composting toilets, that avoid polluting water and preclude

>wasting resources. (3) Price water right so that the market works

>to keep it clean, not contaminate it with excreta.[4]

>

>[For individual households, real solutions are already available:

>zero discharge household waste systems. An excellent new book by

> del Porto and Carol Steinfeld, THE COMPOSTING TOILET

>SYSTEM, will dispel any fears you may have that composting

>toilets are a step backward.[5] With microflush toilets and

>vacuum-flush toilets now readily available, you can have the

>bathroom of your dreams, yet compost your household wastes into

>an odor-free product that is entirely satisfactory as

>agricultural fertilizer. These days, there are companies that

>will manage the system for you, including removing the compost.

>Your household waste system can be installed, maintained, and

>managed by professionals, just like your electrical and heating

>systems.

>

>But what about apartment buildings and office buildings in

>cities? Although we know of no one who has applied it, the

>technology certainly exists for manufacturing building-scale

>waste systems based on anaerobic digesters, which would produce

>methane gas and fertilizer. As Abby A. Rockefeller said recently

>in an interview, " Surely, human ingenuity can do this. " Such

>systems would be cheaper than current sewage systems because they

>wouldn't require miles of underground pipes to connect to a

>centralized sewage treatment plant, and they would conserve

>hundreds of billions of gallons of water each year.

>

>[Every time we flush the toilet, 3.3 gallons of drinking water

>are degraded. At 5.2 flushes per day (average), each of us

>presently degrades 6260 gallons of drinking water each year to

>flush away our 1300 pounds of excrement -- 1.6 trillion gallons

>of water per year in the U.S.]

>

>Naturally, we would need to keep toxicants out of these

>composting systems, but that has always been true (even though we

>have ignored this fact) and we might as well face up to it now.

>Toxic household products will have to be phased out as part of

>any plan for sustainable living.

>

>Toxic industrial wastes should be managed by the industries that

>make them, not dumped into the environment that sustains all

>life. Unusable wastes are a sure sign of inefficiency.

>

>Lastly, what to do with today's mountains of toxic sludge?

>Obviously they must be handled as hazardous wastes because that's

>what they are. [Probably above-ground storage in concrete

>buildings is the only satisfactory solution at the present time.

>(See REHW #260.)]

>

>[You say we can't do any of this because we've been doing it

>another way for 100 years? Ask yourself, what kind of people

>would dump their excreta into their drinking water in the first

>place? And what kind of people, faced with workable, cheaper,

>more environmentally sound alternatives would continue to insist

>that dumping their excreta into their drinking water is the only

>way to live?]

>

>==========

>[1] Abby A. Rockefeller, " Civilization and Sludge: Notes on the

>History of the Management of Human Excreta, " CURRENT WORLD

>LEADERS Vol. 39, No. 6 (December 1996), pgs. 99-113. Ms.

>Rockefeller is president of the ReSource Institute for Low

>Entropy Systems, 179 Boylston St., Boston, MA 02130; telephone

>(617) 524-7258.

>

>[2] Copeland, WASTEWATER TREATMENT: OVERVIEW AND

>BACKGROUND [98-323 ENR] (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research

>Service, January 20, 1999). Available at: http://-

>www.cnie.org/nle/h2o-29.html .

>

>[3] D. Krauss and Albert L. Page, " Wastewater, Sludge and

>Food Crops, " BIOCYCLE (February 1997), pgs. 74-82. Krauss was

>staff director for the National Research Council study, USE OF

>RECLAIMED WATER AND SLUDGE IN FOOD CROP PRODUCTION (Washington,

>D.C.: National Academy Press, 1996).

>

>[4] Goodland and Abby Rockefeller, " What is Environmental

>Sustainability in Sanitation? " IETC'S INSIGHT [newsletter of the

>United Nations Environment Programme, International Environmental

>Technology Centre] Summer, 1996), pgs. 5-8. The International

>Environmental Technology Centre can be reached at: UNEP-IETC,

>2-1110 Ryokuchikoen, Tsurumi-ku, Osaka 538, Japan. Telephone:

>(81-6) 915-4580; fax: (81-6) 915-0304; E-mail:

>cstrohma@...; URL: http://www.unep.or.jp/. See also Abby

>A. Rockefeller, " Sewage Treatment Plants vs. the Environment, " an

>unpublished paper dated September, 1997. And: Abby A.

>Rockefeller, " Sludge is Sludge; The Illusion of Safety, " an

>unpublished paper dated June 26, 1996. Ms. Rockefeller is

>president of the ReSource Institute for Low Entropy Systems, 179

>Boylston St., Boston, MA 02130; telephone (617) 524-7258.

>

>[5] Del Porto and Carol Steinfeld, THE COMPOSTING TOILET

>SYSTEM BOOK (Concord, Mass.: Center for Ecological Pollution

>Prevention, 1999). ISBN 0-9666783-0-3. See

>http://www.ecological-engineering.com/ctbook.html; $29.95 plus

>$3.30 shipping ($12 overseas shipping) from: Center for

>Ecological Pollution Prevention, 50 Beharrell St., P.O. Box 1330,

>Concord, Mass. USA 01742. Phone (978) 369-9440. Fax: (978)

>368-2484. E-mail: ecop2@.... See also: Carol Steinfeld,

> " Composting Toilets Come to the Rescue in Massachusetts, "

>BIOCYCLE (April 1996), pgs. unknown. See http://-

>www.ecological-engineering.com/rescue.html And see: Carol

>Steinfeld, " Composting Toilets Emerge as Viable Alternatives, "

>Environmental Design & Construction (July/August 1998), pgs.

>unknown. See http://www.edcmag.com/archives/7-98-14.htm.

>

>Descriptor terms: sewage; human waste; sludge; agriculture;

>hazardous waste; compost; sewage treatment systems;

>