Sewers and Society
The toilet hidden in the privacy of your bathroom is part of a huge publicly funded and maintained system. Flush toilets need piped water to flush, and the waste must flow either into a cesspit or a sewer. Public sewer systems were built to replace private cess-pits in the cities of the nineteenth century like London, Paris and Chicago. Some of the finest engineering design - and large amounts of tax money -went into these elaborate mechanisms for the public processing of private waste. The sewers were seen as symbols of a healthy social order, and elegant ladies would tour the Paris sewers.
With the introduction of toilets and piped water, between 1857 and 1872 per capita usage of water in Cleveland, Ohio increased from 8 to 55 gallons. The tourist industry in Spain today consumes 6 times as much water as agriculture. Goleta's population grew from 73,000 in 1996 to 85,000 in 1998; the district now has 120 miles of sewer pipes and a treatment plant, newly upgraded for $21 million, that can handle 9,700,000 gallons of waste water each day. Before the drought years of the late 1980s, the facility processed about 7 million gallons a day but with the installation of water-saving showers and toilets figures for Goleta today are closer to 5 million gallons (including industrial use). The end products are, "grey water " and sludge/ "biosolids." The Goleta Sanitary District produces about 500 dry tons of biosolids a year (depending on the weather). It makes biosolids available free to any citizen who wants them, and describes them as useful landfill, landscape or soil amendments; in 1997 it gave away 253 tons, in 1998 81 tons. However sludge cannot be used in organic farming.
