Questions becoming raised right now by the Green movement and by environmentalists apply to sanitation. From the Green perspective the issue is power use:
How considerably power is used in numerous sanitation approaches?
What kind of power is employed?
How considerably carbon emission is becoming generated?
From an environmental standpoint the concern is environmental impact:
How several and how significantly environmentally damaging emissions and by-items are developed?
How considerably of the earth’s natural resources are becoming utilized or contaminated?
Can these resources be replenished?
On a continuum from worst to finest, in this writer’s view, the worse would be waste treatment plants. The best would be non-discharge onsite systems. In the middle would be septic systems.
The worst: waste treatment plans use fossil energy, a wonderful deal of energy.
They use chemicals, a fantastic deal of chemicals. The give out treated water that still has nutrients. Chemicals and nutrients being dumped into bodies of water are an invitation to environmental trouble.
Septic systems, on the other hand, use very little power. They put nutrients into the ground but under ideal circumstances these nutrients are integrated by the earth and do not get into the groundwater.
The concern with septics is that when conditions are not perfect these systems can harm the environment as well as endanger human well being. Floods and system malfunctions are the culprits. Reports of e-coli and sanitation nutrients leeching into creeks, streams, lakes and the ocean abound. These reports increase during times of heavy precipitation and flooding. Every state reports a specific percentage of failed or failing septic sytems.
1 east coast state (name no names) reports more than 80,000 failing septic systems.
Systems that treat water borne sanitation also use energy but they put absolutely nothing into the ground except safely treated water.
The very best marks go to waterless systems. With the exception of incinerating systems, these use small power and put absolutely nothing into the ground. The greatest varieties of these systems are evaporative. They harness the wind and sun for power and require no electricity or fossil fuel.
Waste treatment plants are a needed and extremely high-priced evil for cities with significant concentrations of individuals. Underground collection lines and plant construction pose environmental and monetary costs. Operation and maintenance call for energy. The emissions are environmentally undesirable. Improvement to the top quality of treatment will enhance the expenses. But for the forseeable future we live with it. So lengthy as our civilization uses water for sanitation these plants will be a necessity. Septic systems will also be with us as lengthy as we use water for sanitation.
It is beginning to strike some individuals as odd that we would use perfectly very good nicely water and very expensively treated rinking water to flush our urinals and toilets. Very good water is becoming scarce and treated water is becoming increasingly costly. So why do we then proceed to flush it down the toilet? ‘Makes no sense from the Green perspective or environmental perspective! About twenty percent of the water used in an average household in the United States gets flushed down the toilet. Somebody go figure!
The future, logically speaking, belongs with waterless sanitation. But culturally speaking we want to flush. How high-priced that preference becomes is a guess. It definitely will turn into much more costly. And only time will tell how long cultural preference prevails over logic.