by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Also a cause of the loss of clean freshwater around the globe...
While the introduction of the water-based sewage system in towns and cities (and later nigh on everywhere now) may have reduced disease in those places – though I think that proper hygiene education would have done the same, more than likely – the same system puts a great strain on the country's water resources and also leads to other problems.
Each and every time the lavatory is being flushed anywhere between a five too ten liters of water, clean water, sometimes more, is being flushed down the drain, literally, and this, subsequently ends up in the rivers and finally in the sea.
While in the days of old the water cycle of the freshwater going into the sea coming back to land as rain did work it no longer does as households and industry discharge way too much freshwater into the rivers and in the end the sea.
This freshwater, from the towns and cities, via the drains, change the chemical balance of the seawater and also add to the rising sea levels and I would suggest more so than any melting of any ice in the polar regions.
In addition to the fact that the water going into the sea, in the end, from the water-based sewage system is, basically, freshwater it also is nutrient-rich and hence causes yet another problem, both in rivers and sea, and that is that it promotes the growth of algae.
A complete rethink is required first and foremost of how we use the sewage system that we have a present, and that case would mean to flush it less, and also to think of a new way where the waste is, in fact, separated from the rainwater in the drains and gets turned into fertilizer. It can be done for it has been done before.
When it comes to the use of the lavatory and the flush it would be a good idea to follow the adage “If it's yellow let it mellow; if it's brown flush it down” and this would already make a great difference as to the amount of water that we needlessly flush down the drain. This is primarily in order to stop the waste of water, per se.
Then, if we insist to carry on with water, we must change to a graywater system for flushing, though the ideal would be to go away from the water-based sewage system and find another way.
Composting toilets are, obviously, and answer and those are becoming commercially available now as well; units which can actually be fitted indoors, doing away with the need for the outhouse. Though, where possible, the outhouse for the toilet is a good answer, as it always has been.
No, I am not suggesting that we go back to the eighteenth century, and before, but some of the old ways have proven to work and together with proper hygiene the outhouse and the night soil is an option.
We must stop flushing clean water down the drain and that now, not next year or decade.
© 2010
