Permaculture Graphs

4. CASE STUDY: The Ecology of Sewage Treatment Plants vs. Composting Toilets

5. “Waste Water” - September 9th, 2019 / SPRINGFIELD — An equipment malfunction resulted Monday in the release of an estimated 90,000 gallons of untreated wastewater into the Connecticut River, according to an announcement by the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission. The commission is notifying area residents and downstream communities of the malfunction at the York Street pump station. The 90,000 gallons is a preliminary estimate, a spokeswoman said.”

6. “It is in the nature of sewering and sewage treatment to compound environ- mental problems in the process of moving sewage and in attempting to remove from sewage the pollutants it carries. Spreading sewage sludge on land is but the latest in the compounding of environmental damage from sewerage. This practice must be banned and there must be a federal reorientation of all technology dealing with human excreta and the waste materials from industry and society that now are carried away by sewers. The reorientation must center on biologically based on-site pollution prevention and resource recycling technologies mandated through a revised Clean Water Act.”

- Abby Rockefeller, co-inventor of the composting toilet and director of RILES (Resource Institute for Low Entropy Systems)

7. Many sanitation experts believe that standard toilets are poorly designed  technologies. In their seminal book Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Paul Hawken and engineers Amory and L. Hunter Lovins discuss the engineering virtues of the standard American toilet: “In an effort to make them ‘invisible’ a toilet mixes pathogen-bearing feces with relatively clean urine. Then it dilutes that slurry with about 100 times its volume in pure drinking water, and further mixes the mess with industrial toxins in the sewer system, thus turning ‘an excellent fertilizer and soil conditioner into a serious, far-reaching, and dispersed disposal problem. Supplying the clean water, treating the sewage, and providing all the delivery and collection in between requires systems whose cost strains the resources even of wealthy countries, let alone the 2 billion people who lack basic sanitation.” Centralized sewage treatment - is costly, energy intensive, not as effective as nature’s own way of breaking down harmful pathogens, chemicals and heavy metals through microbial digestion, and produces a toxic waste (sewage sludge) for which there is currently no environmentally safe way to dispose of. This is what you call a high entropy technology, since a lot of energy – both the energy used in the treatment, and the organic energy contained in the human “waste” - are lost in the treatment process. In contrast, a composting toilet helps nature’s own digestive processes to breathe more deeply, closing a nutrient cycle and returning human excreta back to condition the soil.