The Big Necessity (23 page)

 

Public bathrooms, and their absence, throw up big questions. For me, the questions started with the doors. In China, I asked a lot of people
about why their toilets had none. I thought I was asking a question about habit and design, but without exception I was given answers that were about civility. A Communist Party official I met in Chengdu was offended by the question. “Those are the old-style toilets. We are civilized now.” Wang Ming Ying hadn't thought about it before, but now she did, she kept her options open as to the reason, musing that “maybe it's an indication of a lack of civility. Or because when we go to the bathroom we are all the same?” An expat in Beijing said, “All my colleagues leave the door open. It's because they're not bothered.” For the Chinese, civilization is not about privacy or enclosures. They have public bathrooms with no doors, but those civilized Westerners have hardly any public restrooms to put the doors in.

Those Chinese who are being publicly educated to adopt Western standards of civility might reasonably point to a certain rather bizarre bathroom-related scandal of 2007, when Senator Larry Craig of Idaho pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct with an undercover police officer in an airport toilet stall. The case generated plenty of media glee about homosexual pickup codes such as foot tapping. But I waited in vain for someone to explain the weirdest thing about the whole story: that Craig had been able to peer in at the cop on the toilet because many American public bathroom partitions have gaps in the doors large enough to see into. New York University sociologist Harvey Molotch was surprised when I asked him about it. He'd never thought about it, but now that I mentioned it, “I suppose it's about control.” The need to control criminal activity overrides prudish values that were made obvious when the owners of the offending Craig airport bathroom announced they would install “chastity partitions,” with no irony. By conventional standards of civility, American public necessities are caught short.

Does that matter? Even in public-bathroom–deprived cities like London and New York, there are facilities available, even if they are in cafes or pubs, and even if they cost a muffin or a cake, even if they don't have chastity partitions. But those who make a living caring about public bathroom provision think that toilets are a test of what living in a city means, of what civilization is. Concepts of civility and propriety
are complex and changing—there are now surveillance cameras in some English pub bathrooms—and so is the public bathroom. It's a work in progress along with the civilization it is supposed to represent, a truth immortalized in the excellent one-liner by Mohandas K. Gandhi when he was asked what he thought of Western civilization. He replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”

 

 

_______________________

Blue Plains wastewater treatment plant, Washington, D.C.

(Author)

 

 

BAD SMELL, BIG TOMATOES

____________

 

 

It is my first and last day of sewage school. The school premises are nothing much to look at, consisting of a Portakabin in the parking lot of Barston sewage treatment works near Birmingham. I've joined a class of local schoolchildren, in one of five classrooms run by Severn Trent, one of the ten utilities that supply clean drinking water and remove dirty water for the people of England and Wales. The education program is funded by the utility in an attempt to remind the public of the vital work it does. It is considered a good investment.

After a brief trot through the water cycle and some green lessons—washing a car with a hose uses 2.3 gallons of water a minute, children, so use buckets—we put on our wellies for the tour. The facility dates from 1911 and hasn't changed much since, but it has all the basics of modern wastewater treatment. First, the influent, brown water rushing in from the sewers, which can be seen through a viewing hole in the ground. There are the screening grills, which catch all the large foreign objects, then the compactor, which crunches them up. It looks like it's not working, but only because its pace is glacial. Slowly, slowly, it spits out rags and pen caps and thousands of yellow sweet-corn kernels that humans can't digest. They dot the muck like gems, and are prized by birds.

Next come the first tanks. Wastewater treatment is much tinkered with—a thousand plants will have 999 different processes, a worker tells me—but the basics are unchangeable. Solids are removed from sewage first by filtering and letting them sink. That is primary treatment. Secondary treatment involves feeding oxygen to microorganisms that break down any organic content still in the wastewater. Tertiary treatment cleans the water further with sand filtration or UV-light disinfection.

At the settlement tanks, we learn that the scum on the top of the water is grease that won't sink, and that the heaviest solids are already settling to the bottom. A condom—an “adult balloon,” in the teacher's whispered words—floats near the surface. Secondary treatment here is done with old-fashioned bacteria beds, huge circular tanks filled with bits of coke, limestone, or special plastic parts that are covered with bacteria and sprayed with sewage water from endlessly rotating mechanical arms. The bacti-beds have fallen out of favor because they tend to be smelly. Aeration is a newer, better way of getting oxygen to the bacteria so they eat faster. Elsewhere, this is done in long lines of tanks known as aeration lanes, where the brown waters foam from the bubbling oxygen. (A chocolate mousse effect is desirable.) Secondary treatment is all Barston does, and the bacteria-cleaned effluent goes into a nearby stream. I lean over obediently to look at its color. The teacher enthuses. It's clear! Not brown! And then it's time to make sewage soup.

 

It is centuries since sewage consisted of pure human fecal material. Into sewage, anything goes. The French call this
tout à l'égout
or “everything down the drain” (to be contrasted with their earlier habit of discharging
tout à la rue
). An enterprising sewage treatment manager in Utah arrestingly expressed this by issuing bottles of cleaned sewage effluent, whose labels listed the following ingredients: “Water, fecal matter, toilet paper, hair, lint, rancid grease, stomach acid and trace amounts of Pepto Bismol, chocolate, urine, body oils, dead skin, industrial chemicals, ammonia, soil, laundry soap, bath soap, shaving cream, sweat, saliva, salt, sugar. No artificial colors or preservatives. Some variations in taste and/or color may occur due to holidays, predominant cuisine preference, infiltration/inflow, or sewer cross-connections.” The manager told reporters that he was
trying to raise people's consciousness about what they put down the drain. In Severn Trent's classroom, the same message is conveyed by the teacher, who has taken sewage class more times than he can remember. Each time, he sees the same reactions: Disgust. Amusement. And if he's lucky, enlightenment.

The ingredients of sewage soup are a tankful of water and whatever else the class might have put down the sink, toilet, gutter, or drain that day. The teacher asks for suggestions, then adds the contaminant to the water. Shampoo, soap, toothpaste, washing powder, rice, salt. A “number one” is lime cordial. A “number two” is Weetabix—a wheat breakfast biscuit—soaked in water. That's the easy part.

The rest of our lesson involves filtering the filth out of the water, in an attempt to impart the difficulty—and dubious sanity—of modern industrial society's paradigm of waterborne waste treatment, whereby you take clean drinking water, throw filth into it, then spend millions to clean it again. My team manages to get a passable liquid. The teacher is pleased. But nobody has considered the stuff that's been filtered. Nobody mentions the sludge.

 

When sewage is cleaned and treated, the dirt that is collected and removed is called sludge, except in the United States, where it's called biosolids by some people and poison by others. For the last twenty years, the blandly named product has been the center of an increasingly loud and bitter battle. The great Victorian gardener Sir Joseph Paxton once said of sewage that it was “a great rough sort of business. You cannot put it into nice forms and ways.” In the United States, the biosolids debate—and debate is a polite way of putting it—has reached the highest corridors of power. It has made people rich. It has come to involve alleged deaths and illness, lawsuits, and bitterness. In short, sludge disposal has become a very rough sort of business.

I contact the official face of the biosolids industry in the United States. The National Biosolids Partnership, an alliance between the EPA and the wastewater industry, directs me elsewhere. They want me to see the best of the best, and the obvious choice is a small facility half an hour from the U.S. Capitol.

The town of Alexandria has cobbled streets and expensive town houses, Colonial aesthetics and money. We are getting lost, and it's my fault. The taxi driver has never been to the Alexandria Sanitation Authority treatment plant before. He thinks it should be near the Old Town but I say that's impossible. Wastewater treatment plants are nearly always on the outskirts of town. Anyway, I'd be able to locate the place by the smell, with which I was by now familiar: mustiness, on the edge of unpleasant but not quite. I was wrong on all counts.

A few blocks west of the expensive town houses, we find the smartest, sweetest-smelling sewage treatment plant I've ever seen. I'm expecting to be met by a middle-aged engineer, as wastewater treatment senior staff generally are, but Paul Carbary is a young, handsome man with a goatee, a subtle tattoo, and a cheerful manner. Though he looks youthful enough to be in college, Carbary directs ASA's biosolids program, which has the optimistic name of Green Fields. He is one of the public faces of biosolids, as is ASA, and in these times, the industry needs all the good PR it can get.

Carbary is joined by the team leader of dewatering (a process that makes soggy sludge less soggy), a terse, big man named Joel Gregory, who looks like he'd rather be dealing with sludge than with me and only reveals a darkly dry sense of humor after an hour or so of silence. Carbary, though, is all energy and bounce. He has an earnest eagerness which I will let flow over me, because it's early and they have provided breakfast.

They launch into a lecture on the process of biosolids production, officially known as “the solids treatment train.” The lecture is designed for ASA trainees, but Carbary translates the technical terminology so I get the essence. The solids removed from liquid sewage are first thickened, then treated. The goal is to take a liquid product that can be dangerous and make something dry and safe enough to apply to land as fertilizer. At ASA, solids are thickened using centrifuges that remove water content—“kind of like a washing machine, throwing the liquid out to the sides”—then treated in pasteurizing heat facilities that “jack the temperature up to 70 C, hold it, and kill all the disease-causing organisms in the sludge.” What, salmonella and E. coli? Helminths and ascaris ova?

Carbary is confident. “Yes. Gone.”

Sludge is classified according to the EPA's Code of Federal Regulations, Title 40, Part 503 (usually shortened to “the Part 503 rules”). Class A has to be treated until no pathogens can be detected; in Class B, pathogens are reduced but still present. Class A Exceptional Quality, which ASA produces, must have fewer heavy metals than Class A. This is more expensive to produce, but can be applied more liberally: EQ solids can be spread in parks, fields, and schoolyards with no requirement to inform neighbors or local officials. Class B can be applied to agricultural land, reclaimed sites, and forests, all judged to be “nonpublic contact” sites, with some restrictions. (Sites must be a certain distance from human habitation, and only certain crops can be harvested.) It can also be sprayed on trees.

Carbary and Gregory are proud of their facilities. They should be, because $45 million was spent upgrading the plant to produce EQ. Those millions have funded a process that in Carbary's view is “pretty damn cool.” He wants to convey how cool it is by using an analogy I can understand. “It's like turning milkshake into cake.”