Some of the challenges we're facing in creating sustainable-but-comfortable ways of living for the 21st century have ready solutions. But how can we build momentum to put those solutions to use -- political, economic, social -- if the challenges are largely invisible?
First, we have to reveal them. Take the underground maze of ducts and pipes that deal with our "wastewater" -- everything that flows into the 6,600-odd miles of New York City's sewer system whether from a faucet or a flush. (Some of the current pipes date back to the system's inception in the mid-18th century.) The city's 14 sewage treatment plants handle 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater a day; about 162 gallons per each of the city's eight million residents. *
No matter how you look at it, that's a lot of crap. But out of sight, out of mind, right?
Well, not exactly. New York has a combined sewer outflow (CSO) system, which mixes "wastewater" with runoff from rain -- and the plastic shopping bags, restaurant menus, dog poop and more that stormwater picks up as it hurtles along the parking lots, sidewalks and gutters into the storm drains. And whenever the volume of combined sewer flow overwhelms the capacities of the city's treatment facilities, raw sewage ends up flowing into our waterways, including New York Harbor and Jamaica Bay.
Not so invisible anymore...especially if you like to walk or bike along, or boat and swim on, these or other unlucky bodies of water in the area. And let's not forget the many critters that live in, on and around the water, like the hundreds of different birds that call the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge home or visit it during their migrations. Not such a healthy situation for them, either.
As Carter Craft, my colleague at the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance recently noted, dealing effectively with these CSOs is vital to the city's future sustainability.
When I was up in Vermont a couple weeks ago (for the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists), I attended a workshop at the Vermont Law School. VLS pays a lot of attention to its ecological footprint; when it recently renovated Debevoise Hall, a campus centerpiece, the 115-year-old building was outfitted a lot of green building features, including six nifty recycling toilets. They use no water or chemicals, but instead employ microbial action to decompose waste. That is, they compost.
Voilà: a source point for sewage pollution neutralized. And then there's the financial payoff: along with six other composting toilets in the school's Oakes Hall, these systems have dramatically reduced the school's water use, saving funds for other needs as the price of town-supplied water rises.
I don't pretend to think that it would be easy or cheap to retrofit New York's centuries-old urban and residential infrastructure with recycling toilets. But what about new projects, or special uses...such as creating and improving more public toilets, a perennial topic on the on the City Council's agenda? According to Stephen Rooney of Truex, Cullins & Partners Architects, the Burlington, Vermont design and construction team that restored and renovated both VLS halls, “[T]hese systems were originally developed for buildings not used year round, such as parks and buildings out in areas that couldn’t have conventional plumbing." Sounds like a great system for city park buildings, public facilities, and squares where public toilets are sited.
Recycling toilets would take a load off the CSO system, while also creating a closed loop process that transforms human organic output into a resource, instead of turning it into pollution.
And then there's the whole question of what we call "wastewater."
Credible predictions are that the human population will bulge to 11 billion by 2050, with the majority of those people living in cities, and in coastal (that is, ecologically fragile) areas. (New York City's own population recently hit a record high of 8.2 million.) Urban sewer and water infrastructure in the U.S. is aging and under-maintained. And climate disruption will probably bring on big, unpleasant shifts in the water cycle, making fresh, drinkable water an even more precious (and for some, expensive) commodity than it already is. We can't afford to dub anything watery as "waste."
As modest as recycling toilets sound, they're a proven piece of the solution to a lot of urban problems. Compostivus!
* Source: Gotham Gazette
