GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL . . . .maybe

This from my sons online journal. He and wife found "paradise" here on a beautiful island with a nice community and . . .well . . . a few complications. However, they think positive most of the time.There's a good side to this too. read on. . . .

January 14, 2006

Rural septic system moment

When we lived in the city we took the sewer system for granted. We could flush and forget about it – and you could flush almost anything. In contrast, the majority of households on Texada Island use various forms of "on-site sewage disposal," to borrow a phrase from BC's bureaucrats. Now, when we flush, we are making a deposit in our own septic tank, and the liquids involved, after passing through the tank, filter into the soil through a nearby leach field before joining the local water table.

Up until last year, British Columbia law required rural households to construct a conventional septic system with tanks and a leach field for new homes. Now, the law allows for "alternative systems," including composting toilets. The main difference, from my perspective, is that conventional systems are inherently wasteful, while composting systems are designed to turn human manure (a euphemism) into a rich fertilizer.

The larger photo on this page shows our septic tank being pumped, last week. The partially decomposed shit (ok, no more euphemisms; instead I'm going to use a perfectly good English word, with a 400-year history) is pumped into a truck (smaller photo), then taken to Powell River and dumped into a "sewage lagoon" for further decomposition. Eventually, the lagoon is pumped out, and its contents go to a landfill somewhere "far away."

Of course, there really is no "away" where we can forget about it. In reality, we as individuals should come to terms with our shit, and ideally we should find a constructive way to recycle it back into growing more food. That's what the Chinese have done, safely and efficiently, for more than forty centuries.

That's also what we would like to do someday here at our place. But for now we're using the conventional septic system that we were required to install five years ago. Maybe five years from now, by our next septic tank pump-out, we'll finally be ready to close the loop with a composting system.

--Tom