Sanitation, sewers, and cities.
The rise of the city brought mankind’s first awareness of sanitation. The Romans built splendid public baths and toilets linked to fairly sophisticated water and waste deliverly systems. The ruins of the pre-Roman Phonecian city of Kerkouane in today’s Tunisia boast a bathtub in every home. The level of attention to urban sanitation then went into decline.
One of the world’s newer cities, Portland invested in sanitary infrastructure shortly after its founding toward the end of what could be considered western civilization’s sanitation dark ages. In the nearly two millennia between the remarkable water and sewerage systems of the ancient world and the work of germ theorists and sanitary engineers in modern times, there were few advances in urban sanitation.
Portland sewers from 1864 to the Big Pipe
By the mid-19th century large areas of the great cities of the West had become filthy, smelly slums. Until London got its first modern sewer in 1853, inhabitants would simply dump their chamber pots in the streets. For obvious reasons, the idea of using water to bear away filth caught on quickly. Even tiny Portland, Oregon would build its first, albeit rudimentary sewers, in 1864. Over the years, wooden troughs were replaced with terra cotta piping which in turn gave way to larger, more efficient brick and concrete sewers.
As homes, businesses and streets of the city benefitted from various advances in sanitation, the Willamette was essentially dead by the 1930s. Citizen outrage led to a succession of reforms and eventually to the construction of the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant, which opened in 1952. But as the city grew, treatment facilities could barely keep up with the population and state and federal regulations had raised the bar.
Combined Sewer Overflows (WikiCommons image)
Portland still experiences Combined Sewer Overflows during rainstorms. When large amounts of rainwater runs into the same underground pipes that carry away sanitary sewage, it causes them to overflow into the Willamette. But soon Portlanders will see the end of the familiar warnings not to use the river for recreational purposes. By 2014, many miles of Eastside, Westside and Columbia Slough Big Pipes, 12 feet in diameter, will carry waste water and storm water from neighborhoods on the Willamette to the treatment plant on the Columbia.
The City’s Bureau of Environmental Services provides a fascinating overview of the Evolution of Wastewater Treatment in Portland.
From Waterborne to Ecological Sanitation?
While state of the art waterborne sanitation systems may be environmentally sustainable in some urban environments of the U.S., they are inappropriate for desert areas and for most of the world’s mega cities. And as global sanitation specialists are demonstrating, they are unsustainable in the mega-cities of the developing world. Is Ecosan the future?
Portland’s Tryon Life Community Farm recognizes that waterborne sewage systems are not appropriate for many environments and are experimenting with alternatives.
When the rural collective near Portland built their composting toilet complex they fell afoul of prevailing building codes and initiated the project ReCode Oregon. The group is examining how city and state regulations can support rather than inhibit creative and sustainable living, while educating and engaging grassroots communities in changing these codes. ReCode invites community activists interested in “legalizing sustainability” to meet monthly on last Tuesdays. For information contact community organizer Melora Golden.
Portland State University graduate Laura Kathryn Dvorak looks at the Composting Toilet Initiative of Tryon Life Farm and a community composting site in Southeast Portland, in her Master’s Thesis entitled R.E.S.O.U.R.C.E. Reclaiming Everyone’s Soil: Opportunity to Understand Relational Cycles of Ecology.
See also “Tryon farm dreams collide with reality: Collective committed to sustainability finds itself on wrong side of city, state policies — and wants to change them,” By Jim Redden, The Portland Tribune, Jan 4, 2008.
