The flush toilet is not just an appliance; it is an icon in our “waste culture”. At the same time it’s an environmental disaster. In Nature there is no waste, one organism’s excrement is another’s food. Humans create waste because we ignore natural laws and systems that we are dependent upon.
Human waste – black gold
Treated properly, human excreta can be a natural and beneficial fertiliser – Asian agricultures flourished by recycling human waste into cropland. Nations and cultures endure only as long as their topsoil. Now we mix human excreta with clean water, send it through pipes to a sewage plant, and then spend millions to separate the two. Then the “cleaned” effluent is dumped into waterways or the oceans and creates algae bloom and “death zones”. The nutrient load is not the only problem; industry adds heavy metals, toxic chemicals and pesticides. Pharmaceuticals are a serious problem, especially antibiotics and oestrogen. Antibiotic resistance can be transferred to other bacteria – wastewater treatment plants can become breeding grounds for resistant bacteria.
On-site resource recycling technologies like composting toilets and small-scale treatment plants that dispose of everything back onto land are the answer. Nearly half of our water use is through the flush toilet. Water shortages globally will make it difficult to carry on with this unsustainable pollution of our environment. By some estimates it takes one to two thousand tons of water to flush one ton of human waste (The Humanure Handbook, by J. Jenkins).
In the Rodney district we have numerous examples of unsustainable sewage disposal and the proposal to pump Matakana’s human waste to Omaha, from one water catchment into another, is just one of them.
Taking responsibility for our eco-footprint starts in the toilet, but then the world’s population has tripped in my lifetime – that means a lot more poo to put back into our soils.
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