Flushing Toilets

Yes, the Victorian sewage system next to my area is dysfunctional. People from the water service have been returning to roughly the same area for years. Water run off is causing potholes and cracks.

I wouldn’t know where to begin to calculate the benefits/negative impact of each method. 

TheCatWoman said:

As things like ammonia and other products that could be made from urine are made in other countres many tanker containing these products have been held up in the Straits of Hormuz, it seems a bit of a no brainer to make our own, it's not likely to be something we'd run out of.

I wondered about using our urine too, also that of farm and domestic animals.

If I were to begin brightening my whites at home using this method, I would first need to win the lottery to be able to afford to employ people to deal with my laundry.

I do agree about the Strait of Hormuz. The sheer needless waste of our resources, down the drain so to speak,  is mind boggling in a world that has so many issues needing fixed. 

Rome had vats for people to pee in and to put the output from commodes in outside launderies, I think it was Emporer Vespasian who tried to tax it. Urine was allowed to turn to amonia for use in lauderies and used to clean togas and anything else white.

Many people round here have septic tanks as they have no access to mains sewerage, every year or two you get a sludge gulper to come and empty them.

Thank you BeaE.

I would love to see more wetlands. There is an area near where I live that is already a wetland of sort, but it’s sitting adjacent to an area with limited vegetation and it might be ideal for expanding the existing wetland area.

I’m going to check out the Thames Tideway super sewer.

Gosh, that’s fantastic Fibonacci! Thank you very much for your detailed reply.

As you might have guessed, I’m out of my depth when it comes to water (no pun intended) - at least regarding water flushing.

Maybe some of my next questions are unfair to ask you as they don’t relate directly to the UK, but I would like to know the following:

Do any European countries use the UK system of sharing drainage of fresh water and sewage?

Why do some areas in other European countries ask people to dispose of used toilet paper in bins rather than in the toilet bowl? Are there two separate systems in the one country?

What is the most effective way of preventing water runoff from roads or would a combination of things be best? E.g, verge side planting?

I think more education is needed around the issue of people over using fresh water. Many people in this country quip “there’s no shortage of water this year”, when we get heavy rain over a few days. I think people don’t understand why taps shouldn’t be left running unnecessarily. We don’t have water charges in N. Ireland.

Marianne72 said:

I've heard how sewage works' waste is turned into slurry, given free to farmers,

I recall reading that there is an issue with using human waste for this as there are so many drugs in humans that pass into our waste and are hard to remove as well as bacteria (E. coli, Salmonella), viruses (norovirus, enteroviruses), protozoa (Giardia, Cryptosporidium) and helminths (Ascaris) which all require extensive treatment to remove.

I don't think it is cost effective unless done at scale then there is the issue of transporting it and the chances of our incompetent water companies being able to do this properly.

Fibonacci Squid said:

Warning: any questions may be answered in great detail, but will be greatly appreciated 

Let's pass them to the water companies!

Thank you, this is very informative, to hear it from a professional point of view. I think flusing with pure water is really wasteful. It is a crime to flush 1 pt or less urine with a gallon of cleaned water - something Prince Philip [RIP] was annoyed about and quite rightly. Perhaps someone needs to re-design WC bowls' flushing systems.

Wow, that history is fascinating, ArchaeC . I knew the Romans had waste systems [and open drains - Pompeii], but not about India or the Minoans. I think other civilizations used large roadside pots as toilets, which was used on their fields.

I watched, 'Dirty Business' and was horrified, having no prior idea that foul waste is often discharged into rivers. This really does need immediate research and solutions. I used to live on the canal also a canalised-river and at that time the water ran clear, there were plentiful fish, eels, otters and other wildlife.It's dreadful that familes risk illness or death, simply by having a nice holiday at the seaside.

I've heard how sewage works' waste is turned into slurry, given free to farmers, but this can lead to toxicity and micro-plastics being widely distributed, on the land and in rivers. Turning it in fertiliser seems a good solution - if these problems could be resolved, this could also be sold on to gardeners as commercial fertilisers are expensive, with the profit going back to the [hopefully] nationalized water companies. Composting toilets rely on being emptied - I think most people would be squeamish about this system. There are also experiments using microbes to eat waste and turn it into electricity; also using microbes to eat microplastics. NASA are looking into recycling astronauts' waste into food - but again, this might be repugnant for most. It perhaps could be turned into animal feed because they are not fussy eaters!

You may have hit on a special interest. 

Warning: any questions may be answered in great detail, but will be greatly appreciated 

I work with water and these work very well and are used frequently in small scale off the grid areas, but are difficult to scale up due to the housing infrastructure we currently have and also simply a matter of space.

Sewage works do use anaerobic and aerobic decomposition, along with sediment collection (which later gets used for fertiliser). The treated effluent actually has very few harmful pathogens and these are easily diluted at the discharge points (most water treatment, including really nasty stuff like landfill leachate, is, at the end of the day, mostly dilution). This works great apart from as BeaE says, when surface water entering the same system, and this is becoming increasingly worse as both the sewage being delivered to sewage works (increases in housing in previously sparse areas), and the number of intense storms or heavy rainfall periods (climate change) increase. It is this that leads to most episodes of untreated effluent being discharged.

The problem with all of the ideas that AI has come up with is that it requires both completely separate waste systems for greywater and blackwater (talk to anyone who's had any pipework fixed in their house and imagine how putting that piping in would go) and either a location for executing this on or near the property (which both requires more space and is smellier than you think) or transport from many houses to a set location which would involve redoing all of the sewage lines, which is also way more than you think. Basically every road in the UK would need to be dug up. It's a massive challenge. This is absolutely not a country with infinite space.

In terms of adding it to new homes, you are counting on developers to pay for it. More difficult than you'd think. Then there is the question of who would manage the maintenance and disposal/use of the eventual waste products. Would it be taken on by the water companies and paid for by the house owners or a new type of company? What would happen if that company went under?

I think the biggest task right now is getting the sewerage separated from road drainage (and improving road drainage while we're at it, our drain system is not designed for these more intense rainstorm style weather patterns, climate change is very much a thing)

Eventually world wide we will need to look at reducing our water use (I mainly work with the sourcing of freshwater to drink, it's more of a problem than you'd think, even in this country, especially as we're getting more periods of drought, I refer you once again to climate change). A really good technique to build into new builds is the recycling of greywater to be used for things like flushing toilets. This reduces total waste water and preserves super high quality drinking water for the actual drinking bit. You may be able to drink from a toilet bowl, but you do not need to. 

Overall: 

Nice ideas, much harder to implement with limited space and an enormous undertaking for integration into existing infrastructure

It is absolutely essential to review how we're using freshwater and disposing of various different types of surface water

The current sewage treatment already does aerobic and anaerobic digestion very effectively, the issue is that they're largely at or over capacity so are struggling to process it all

Removal of surface runoff from this system will help with the point above and is probably the biggest priority and easiest to tackle currently. If done correctly, it will also help tackle flooding

All of these problems are being made worse by anthropogenic climate change. They will continue to be made worse by anthropogenic climate change. Limiting global warming worldwide will limit how much worse they will be made. 

I think a lot of the problem is caused by surface water (rain) entering the same sewer as the foul water, which overwhelms the system and causes raw sewage to be dumped in rivers.

Fortunately for new developments you almost always have to keep surface water separate.

Anaerobic digestion is cool, I didn't realise it was an option for this. The plants might not be very popular because of the smell, though.

Wetlands are already being used in nutrient neutrality areas to reduce eutrophication from wastewater!

You can get greywater and rainwater harvesting systems, but they don't seem very popular. Possibly because you have to have separate storage for surface water in addition to the harvesting tank, which is expensive.

The system is definitely not very efficient as it is, now there's so many people and more extreme rain.

The Thames Tideway super sewer is a really cool drainage project which relates to this  

I think the first two could be done, I don't know about the atmospheric effects of biogas use would be, but it shouldn't be beyond the bounds of human ingenuity to male it less poluting.

As things like ammonia and other products that could be made from urine are made in other countres many tanker containing these products have been held up in the Straits of Hormuz, it seems a bit of a no brainer to make our own, it's not likely to be something we'd run out of.

If we were going to use reed beds for waste management then we'd have to give up on toilet paper, or have another system for it's removal.

Iains right many of our sewerage systems are Victorian, they do need maintainance and replacement and the more we build new homes the more pressure these aging systems are under. I hope it dosen't take something like The Great Stink again to persaude politicians to invest, or force the foreign owned water companies to stop giving all the money made out in dividends and bonus's back into the system.

Honestly, no idea. Sewage water is gonna end up in the sea somehow, even in rain form. I don't think anything we try will change that.

ArchaeC said:

Could any of these AI suggestions realistically be implemented in all new homes, and eventually in all homes? Is the government likely to be thinking big on sewage matters?

I think many new homes already have some of this integrated by law but the real issue is what happens once it has left the home / estate and is into the larger sewer system that is run by the local authorities.

Most of the big cities where most people live or spend a lot of time each day are build on Victorian era sewage systems that are struggling with the sheet volume as well as crumbling infrastructure and significant limitations on access for maintenance.

Add to this the fact they were privatised and most of the companies are scrimping on maintenance and often find it cheaper to pay the fines for "accidental" discharge into the sea - then you start to see that it is not the design but the management that is the issue.

If we can solve the underlying infrastructure issue then the other plans can be implemented but it will be at massive cost when you consider how many of these plants need to be built around the country and at significant disruption while the work is carried out - and of course there is the small matter of who has to pay for this multi trillion pound project.

For now I suspect the best solution is for new builds to need to have local systems that can do end-to-end processing even though this will add a lot to the cost of such developments.We have to start somewhere.