Background Info:
Recent events and news about water scarcity got me thinking about this. So the question is essentially the title. Or am I missing something?
If you live anywhere that uses a sewer system rather than septic tanks, isn’t it already doing that?
In my area, the water company pulls in from the river, filters and processes it, and pipes it out to homes. It gets used in the homes, discharged into the sewer to a treatment plant, treated, and then pumped back into the river.
Even if your water company’s intake is before the sewage treatment plant, the next town’s intake is downstream. So if you’re not drinking your neighbor’s processed toilet water, you’re drinking that of the town upstream.
Is getting mixed with river water simply enough to “dilute” the ick-factor here, or is there something I’m missing?
If you’re in the Boston area or nearby suburbs the all the sewage goes to the Deer Island treatment plant which eventually pumps the treated water out into the Atlantic…
I just assumed we already were (well, was, in my case, having moved to a place with septic). Several of my family worked in wastewater treatment. It doesn’t bother me
It has to do with the percent of waste in the water. Is it a 1 part per million thing? 1 part per thousand?
It’s kinda like the question of “how big does the body of water have to be before you’re comfortable swimming with a corpse?” Like we all know that’s how it works, but making a direct correlation makes it much more uncomfortable.
My poop feeds the fishes. My city has a giant protected watershed so we drink only the finest bear poop, piped directly into our homes, then our waste is treated, fermented for 30 days until ripe, and pumped out to sea
