A Brief History of Slime

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http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1995Q3/slime.html

 

A Brief History of Slime

 

 

by John C. Stauber and Sheldon Rampton

 

In traditional, agricultural societies, human waste was prized as a prime

ingredient in what the Chinese called " night soil " --artfully composted,

high-grade fertilizer. Things changed with the industrial revolution, which

brought people together in cities where composting and recycling were no longer

practical.

 

At first, open gutters were dug to carry sewage from city streets into nearby

bodies of water. When populations were small and water supplies seemed

unlimited, the wisdom of using fresh water as a vehicle and receptacle for human

waste was not questioned. By the 1920s and 1930s, large cities were piping large

quantities of untreated sewage into rivers and oceans, creating serious

pollution problems. Septic systems in thousands of small and medium-sized

communities were failing due to overloading. Thousands of industries were also

producing chemical wastes and needed to dispose of them.

 

The environmentally sound approach would have been to develop separate treatment

systems for human and industrial waste. Biological wastes should have been

recycled through a system that returned their nutrients to the soil, and

businesses should have been required to separately treat their chemical wastes

on-site so that they could be contained and re-used within the industries from

which they came. At the time, however, it seemed easier and cheaper to simply

dump everything into a single common sewer system. For businesses, the system

provided tax-based aid to help them dispose of their toxic byproducts. For

people, indoor plumbing that magically " carried everything away " was a luxury

that marked their escape from frontier hardship and their entrance into

modernity. The system helped limit the spread of communicable diseases, and for

many it symbolized the difference between primitive crudity and the civilized

benefits of technological society.

 

The problem with this system, however, is that it collects, mixes, and

concentrates a wide range of noxious and toxic materials which are then very

difficult, if not impossible, to separate and detoxify. According to

businesswoman Abby Rockefeller, an advocate of waste treatment reform,

" conventional wastewater treatment systems . . . are not designed to produce

usable end-products. Because this is so, it must be said that failure to solve

the overall problem of pollution caused by the waste materials received by these

systems is a function of their design. "

 

" Today, " observe environmental writers Pat Costner and Joe Thornton, " waterless

treatment systems--on-site composting and drying toilets that process human

wastes directly into a safe, useful soil additive--are available. These dry

systems are more economical than water-flushed toilets and their attendant

collection and treatment systems. However, water-flushed toilets are so

entrenched in the cultural infrastructure that the transition to alternative

waste systems has been blocked. Instead, billions of dollars are spent on

perfecting the mistake of waterborne waste systems: wastes are first diluted in

water and then, at great expense, partially removed. The products of this

treatment are sludge--which requires even further treatment before disposal--and

treated effluent, which carries the remaining pollutants into receiving waters. "

 

To cope with the mounting problem of water pollution, the United States launched

what has become the largest construction grants program in US history, linking

millions of homes and tens of thousands of businesses into central treatment

facilities. As the 1970s dawned, front-page headlines across America told

stories of polluted drinking water and quarantined beachfronts.

Environmentalists pressured Congress to pass the Clean Water Act of 1972, which

according to US Senator Max Baucus, " put us on the course to fishable and

swimmable rivers at a time when one river was known as a fire hazard and others

hadn't seen fish in a generation. " The Clean Water Act required communities to

make sure that by 1977 their sewage plants could remove at least 85 percent of

the pollutants passing through them, and allocated funding to pay for the

additional treatment and filtering technologies needed to achieve this goal. By

1976, the federal government was spending $50 billion per year to help cities

achieve water purity goals.

 

In the 1980s, however, politicians responded to pressure for reduced federal

spending by cutting funds for water treatment, and by the 1990s the money had

been virtually eliminated. In the meantime, the push for clean water had created

another problem--tons of pollution-laden sewage sludge generated as a byproduct

of the treatment process.

 

According to Abby Rockefeller, the hundreds of billions of dollars spent

purifying water through central sewage processing plants has largely been

wasted. " Leaving aside the immense costs of this option, both in energy and in

money, there is the critical though inadequately recognized problem of the

sludge, " Rockefeller states. " The more advanced the treatment of the sewage (the

more successful the separation), the more sludge will be produced, and the

worse--the more unusable and dangerous--it will be. That is, the 'better' the

treatment, the greater the range of incompatible materials that will have been

concentrated in this highly entropic gray jelly. "

 

© Center for Media & Democracy, 520 University Ave., Suite 310, Madison, WI

53703; phone (608) 260–9713; email editor

 

 

 

 

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