Tainted Earth
November 25, 2020 2:12 PM   Subscribe

Alexis Okeowo on the heartbreaking tale of the many rural households in America lacking safe sewage systems – and how entrenched poverty and unusual geology have created a public-health disaster in Alabama (The New Yorker)
posted by adrianhon (8 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
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posted by krisjohn at 3:08 PM on November 25, 2020


I read that yesterday; it's just horrifying.
posted by suelac at 5:14 PM on November 25, 2020


So there's only a thin layer of good topsoil, and it's difficult to make septic systems work? There's a solution for that: it's called composting. And while most compost toilets currently are operated by individual enthusiasts, they can also be operated on a community scale so you don't have to have each person in the neighborhood worrying about maintaining their compost pile at a suitable temperature and moisture level.

Not that technological fixes will do anything about the awful structural racism and classism... but I was surprised that the only fix mentioned in the article was basically "better-engineered septic systems."
posted by sibilatorix at 7:12 PM on November 25, 2020 [2 favorites]


There's a solution for that: it's called composting.

Yes, I read half of the article then did a Cmd+f for 'comp' and found nothing. Why is that? They are not hard to build, they don't need much maintenance, and they can be installed anywhere.
posted by Thella at 10:51 PM on November 25, 2020


I did a quick Google since I had to assume there was some reason why they weren’t considered, and came up with this decent-seeming piece on composting toilets. The most relevant bit:
Could dry toilets and composting scale up to solve large-scale sanitation problems? Michigan State University's Joan Rose is skeptical. Efforts to introduce composting toilets in high-poverty urban areas have faced many challenges, from collection trucks that can't fit up narrow streets to the difficulty of providing enough toilets for the residents, she said. And if you can't solve those issues, others arise.

"When you're talking about a million people in a community and you're trying to compost all that waste, who's going to haul it out?" said Rose. "In some places, it's the poorest of the poor who do all the hauling. And it's women."

Mark Elliott from the University of Alabama thinks that composting toilets would also be a hard sell in rural parts of the United States, where people are used to using flush toilets even if, in some cases, the sewage just gets dumped behind their homes. And then there's the matter of maintenance.

"With composting toilets you've got to do some degree of raking or stirring, and you've got to do some type of emptying," said Elliott. "When it comes to dealing with your own waste, even if you say, 'Oh, don't worry, it's going to be compost at that point, it's not going to stink,' people don't want to do it."
posted by adrianhon at 11:49 PM on November 25, 2020 [6 favorites]


My parents just spent more than $20k replacing their septic system, which included replatting their property as one lot was no longer enough space for a legal septic system and the whole process took more than six months. That was about 1/5 the value of their home.

I think a centralized system just for their street might have been relatively cheaper, but that would involve more cooperation with neighbors than rural people are known for, and many experiences with shared ranch fencing says costs are not spread equally and fairly without much animosity.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:59 AM on November 26, 2020 [3 favorites]


Some people may not want to, but plenty of people do. The article did mention outhouses as something that people in that part of Alabama use. Plenty of people are already using compost toilet systems on a larger scale just fine.

Again, not that compost toilets would solve the structural racism. They're a technological fix that people aren't ready for and need to be ready for everywhere. Climate change is now. It's time to stop making excuses to keep shitting in the drinking water.

But the compost toilets are a tangent, really. This is an article that starts off talking about structural racism - where the state of Alabama can literally arrest people (mostly black) who can't afford a septic tank that won't even work given their soil - and ends with the death of the activist the journalist is following. Due to structural racism.
posted by aniola at 7:58 AM on November 26, 2020 [5 favorites]


There's a solution for that: it's called composting.

Yes, I read half of the article then did a Cmd+f for 'comp' and found nothing. Why is that? They are not hard to build, they don't need much maintenance, and they can be installed anywhere.


Because human litter boxes are a hard sell for a lot of people, particularly in marginalized communities who have to fight against a tide of racism that already sees them—wrongly—as dirty and backward.
posted by corey flood at 9:44 AM on November 26, 2020 [7 favorites]


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