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May 14, 2007
Scatalogically Correct--Poop Culture Author's Op-Ed in the NY Times
reprinted from The New York Times, 4/15/07:
by Dave Praeger
Published: April 15, 2007
NEXT weekend, the Bronx Zoo is planning to unveil a state-of-the-art eco-friendly restroom outside its Bronx River Gate entrance. I say "unveil" because the gleaming structure, with its waterless urinals and composting toilets, was actually opened last fall; but zoo officials have been waiting until Earth Day to publicize it.
They expect to save a million gallons of water a year and recycle the composted waste of 500,000 yearly visitors as fertilizer. And while the press coverage will rightly laud the zoo for money saved, water conserved and resources recovered as part of the city's push for environmentally sound growth, the bigger issue will probably remain unexplored: what's wrong with flush toilets?
Flush toilets evolved from a luxury for the rich to a fixture mandated by New York City because of the disease cholera. Transmitted by fecal contamination of water, cholera ravaged the country -- and the world -- in the decades after the Industrial Revolution as population growth outstripped the capacity of the backyard cesspools above which privies were built. In the second half of the 19th century, medical science identified the connection between waste, water and disease; the thought was then that cholera could be prevented by flush toilets and sewers transporting waste away from the population that created it.
But many cities built their sewers in a time before science and society fully accepted the germ theory of disease. Thus, in accordance with the prevailing "filth theory," which held that running water dilutes waste into harmlessness, sewers simply channeled the accumulated waste of entire cities into the nearest waterway. This, of course, just shifted the burden of waste to downstream cities in the form of dysentery, algae blooms and insufferable stenches wafting off the water.
Eventually the government mandated sewage treatment plants to sequester solid waste and purify water before a city could discharge it. Today Americans flush about 100 million pounds of solid waste down with 32 billion gallons of water into 600,000 miles of sanitary sewers to be processed at any one of more than 16,000 publicly owned sewage treatment plants every single day.
And here is where we find what's wrong with flush toilets: they sever humanity's link in the food chain.
One animal's excrement is another animal's breakfast. This is how nature works: human and animal fecal matter is food for bacteria, which is fertilizer for plants. Humans are at the top of the food chain, but we should also be at the bottom.
So why not use the sludge captured in sewage treatment plants to replace some of the 67 million pounds of nitrogenous fertilizer farmers apply to their land every single day? Because it's not just organic waste churning through the sewers. If it were, then sludge would be a farmer's dream come true.
Read the rest of the article here.
Dave Praeger is the author of "Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product."
Buy POOP CULTURE here.
Posted by feral2 at May 14, 2007 8:24 PM
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