# Sanitation, soils and sewers.



## Verity (Sep 14, 2020)

I'd like to forward a history of sanitation and agriculture- a body of knowledge picked up in planning our house a few years ago.

Dodgy subject as a first public post perhaps, but it's been bothering me that the lack of toilets in Versailles, and sanitation under cities of the 1800's etc. is still not covered.
There IS an explanation of sorts.

It would be wrong to focus on the toilet of times past as a single subject, because it was inextricably linked with culture and health.
The 'classic toilette', or system of doing things regarding the body and health was a closed loop system, and much of it was based on health and sacred ritual first and foremost. As time progressed bathing became less sacred and more social. But bathing was a public activity for the average citizen.
And that's not all.
There were public toilets- literally public.
These were Roman left-overs.





Some sources say there was running water beneath the latrines which was carried to a river or sea outlet.
I beg to differ. My opinion is the soil was collected, composted and used for fertiliser, just as the Chinese are reported to have done for centuries.
It's simple, elegant and beneficial to have done so.
The west seems to have forgotten the technique completely.

This an example from a Sydney newspaper, from c.1877:

_"Many Sydney-siders had been impressed by the "immense" vegetables produced by Chinese market gardeners who made use of sewage as a fertiliser without any ill-effects.
An anonymous poet in the Evening News extolled the benefits of sewage farms._

_Dear people! thus to fill my maw, _​_By outrage of just Nature's law!- _​_If you but us'd your city's filth _​_To fatten crops, and feed their tilth, _​_Till Nature turning "vile" to "good", _​_Returned your waste in fruit or food! _​
_Your farms and fields would gain in wealth, _​_Whate'er your city wins in health, _​_And lustier crops and lengthening lives _​_Would prove how sense, with science thrives._​
So. China and their 'night soil'.

My introduction of how things used to be done stemmed from curiosity on how to have an 'off-grid' grey-water waste system without the dreaded septic tank which seemed retarded even as a child; "You mean some guy with a TRUCK and a vacuum has to come and suck it out every single YEAR?!" THEN where did it go? Made no rational sense at all.
I'm not a hardcore greenie- just wanted a sensible system.
I picked up a permaculture book called 'The Humanure Handbook' by J. Jenkins.

China was the culture most recently using 'night soil', which is- quite frankly- a really good system. There are occasional articles which suggest it was common practise in our culture too. But it's not popular knowledge.
China have now turned to bio-gas but their old system was not broken that it needed to be fixed. Bio-gas sounds good in theory and is obviously functional in practise, but the amount of elaborate fussy development to get the system up and running when a composting toilet worked well for... ever... smacks (to my mind) of the profiteering priorities inherent today.

Farmers would collect the humanure in ceramic pots; it would compost for two years and then, as 'black gold', would fertilise their fields.
When Mao came on the scene his henchmen went round under strict orders to smash every night soil pot and add it to the fertiliser.
The crops started to fail, starvation ensued before much longer.

"Luckily," Nixon made an historic visit in 1973, and before he left the country had made a deal for 60 contracts, including US $391.8 million dollars worth of ammonia fertiliser plants to be built... the kick-start of China's industrial revolution. (The CIA released that doc. in 2005. Link below.)





(Welcome to the club, Fella.)​
From an article by 'Slate':
_China's use of "night soil," as the Chinese rightly call a *manure* that is collected after dark, is probably the reason that its soils are still healthy after four millennia of intensive agriculture, while other great civilisations—the Maya, for one—floundered when their soils turned to dust._

It wasn't just China who did this- they're simply one of the last remaining civilisations to have used it. It was common practice across cultures. They abandoned it for chemical technology and now have new sanitation tech. Again- it wasn't broken that it needed fixing.


A Chinese night-soil collector.






An English 'sewage farm'.






English 'night-soil' collectors.

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Back in Europe, it wasn't until around the 1850's when the flush cistern became accepted, around the time of London's 'Great Stink' in 1858.
There seems to have been some sort of disconnect as folks flocked to the cities, where waste was evidently an afterthought.
The industrial revolution flooded the cities in more ways than one.
Cesspits became overcrowded.. and began to 'percolate' through floorboards of the growing industrial city of London. Disease was rife.

Conveniently, there were (previously existing?) brick tunnels under the city, so one could create a tube station and tram.. ? - I mean sewers.

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And if there weren't, they built them.




And now they're still building them, even bigger, even more elaborate.
Because- why the hell not right?

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A new industry was born in the name of progress... and the modest yet functional English sewer pumping station was created to deal with the Great Stink.
1&2- Abbey Mills Pumping Station
3,4&5- Crossness Pumping Station
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In the antipodes; The following quotes were taken from a Sydney paper by Sharon Beder, an absolutely fascinating paper in its own right (linked below);

_The paper in question explores the role of the British Royal Commission into Sewage Disposal (1898-1915) in facilitating these changes in the way sewage treatment is viewed.
Sewage farms- where the council collects raw sewage and has a section of land filter it to fertilise turnips and other root veg., lucerne and animal fodder, including raising pigs, all for sale, was a profitable business. For some reason, those in power decided it was better to use chemicals to treat the sewage instead, and/or flush it out to sea._

_Chemical precipitants merely clarified the sewage and retarded the action of nitrifying organisms in any subsequent filtering process. 
The International System, Hickson pointed out, had only been around for five years and while over 400 patents had been taken out for various precipitating mediums, "the "survivals" could be counted on the fingers."
Almost all the available literature on the advantages of the system, he claimed, was published by the International company itself._


In a nutshell, as cities grew, so did the interest in profits as engineers vied for the most elaborate solution. If I was a cynical person I'd suggest they'd created a problem in order to profit from the solution.
Sewage farms were abandoned in favour of *new industries*.
Wiki has a write up on sewage farms, saying they 'have a place in developing countries.'

*Sewage farms*_ use sewage for irrigation and fertilizing agricultural land. The practice is common in warm, arid climates where irrigation is valuable while sources of fresh water are scarce. Suspended solids may be converted to humus by microbes and bacteria in order to supply nitrogen, phosphorus and other plant nutrients for crop growth.
Many industrialized nations have implemented conventional sewage treatment to reduce vector and odor problems for water reclamation and use of biosolids; but sewage farming remains an option for developing countries._


Here is a humble 'sewer farm' in Morstead, England.

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Here're some systems preferred by engineers.
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_TRENDS IN SEWERAGE TREATMENT
In the nineteenth century researchers had aimed for an ideal treatment solution that would completely, or almost completely, purify the effluent leaving no awkward by-products and no smell. The existence and discovery of new treatment methods did not end the research or settle disputes since there was always a better treatment to strive for and no agreement could be reached about the efficacy of new treatment methods. The major factors in the formation of a paradigm for sewage treatment methods were;
1) the domination of the field by engineers,
2) the discarding of the search for an ideal solution by engineers and
3) the attainment of consensus amongst engineers about which treatment technologies were adequate._

_Moreover the goal of utilising the sewage as fertiliser was not an aim of engineers [..] and was unlikely to be profitable. 
The debate over sewage treatment methods in the 19th & 20th centuries until recent years can be accounted for by the the establishment of a profession and the formation of a paradigm which occurred during the end of the 19th century.
The establishment of the profession of public health engineering allowed the domination [...] necessary for a paradigm to be formed.
The paradigm, in turn, strengthened the profession, giving it a set of treatment methods to choose from and allowing it to focus on improving those treatments, which were agreed to be appropriate._





_The sewerage treatment paradigm has been continued through the ongoing training of new recruits to the profession, the protection of the profession's autonomy and the exclusion of outside interference in decision-making and the physical existence of millions of dollars of capital works that are a testament to that paradigm.
Whether a technological revolution will emerge that will see a new paradigm put in place has yet to be seen._



In Roman times, bathing was something sacred, and later on, social.
It wasn't a quick shower before a night out drinking, it was a ritual.
Women bathed with women, men with men. Children rarely bathed.

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Lower classes could choose to use a bucket of sorts in the privacy of their own home.
Those who were happy to share a public convenience did so.

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And as for Versailles and such palaces.
They had commodes. There is probably a link to Commodus but I didn't look very hard to follow it up.
From the Latin commodus, 'to accommodate.'
Here's a couple of tacky modern version found in your local hospital or elderly persons bedroom.

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Wood and textiles for the wealth of yore.

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Romans had a good system- I don't pretend to know how they transported business from those communal collection points, horse and cart perhaps, but I do suspect it was similar to the Chinese system in that it was collected and used for soil building.
They were not foolish enough to flush valuable fertiliser OR clean drinking water in to water ways to create toxic problems.
It was a neat, intelligent, closed system.





History of Sewage Treatment
Brisbane night soil collector Lyle Barlow
China's Industrial Plant Import Program
A Timeline of Toilets
The Humanure Handbook - Center of the Humanure Composting Universe
Visit London's Most Glorious Sewage Pumping Station
2. Margate in the middle of the ninteenth century Board of Health Margate | Margate History

p.s. Our story ended happily ever after with a 'worm-farm'.
Looks nice and legit with white ceramic everything indoors, and bore or rain water flushes to the worms who make 'compost tea' for massive growth. We haven't yet hooked it up to the orchard but would it we were staying put. The growth where it reaches the paddock is absolutely massive compared to the non-fertilised grasses.

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> Note: This OP was recovered from the Wayback Archive.





> Note: Archived Sh.org replies to this OP: Sanitation, soils and sewers.


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## Sasyexa (Mar 10, 2021)

Some quality shitposting right here
It doesn't look that simple though. As it was mentioned in the replies: considering the enormity of some of the old world buildings, moving that much soil/liquid would be cumbersome. They must have valued efficiency too, so probably those commodes and earth closets were a later invention.
Maybe a change in gravity/diet/microorganisms increased the frequency at which people needed to relieve themselves. After all, it was allegedly a public event before


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## TrangoSpackler (Mar 10, 2021)

Verity said:


> I'd like to forward a history of sanitation and agriculture- a body of knowledge picked up in planning our house a few years ago.
> 
> Dodgy subject as a first public post perhaps, but it's been bothering me that the lack of toilets in Versailles, and sanitation under cities of the 1800's etc. is still not covered.
> There IS an explanation of sorts.
> ...


Unfortunately for us today's effluence, especially from the metropolitan areas is full of shit other than shit. High concentrations of cocaine and other illicit drugs, estrogen from birth control products, steroids, antibiotics, illegally dumped chemicals and the infamous 'fatbergs' are the stuff of nightmare soil that requires extensive and expensive processing. I recommend the book 'The Big Necessity' by Rose George for a heh heh deep dive into the history of man's struggle with sewage. It is very entertaining as well as informative, full of gems like the origins of high heels, supposedly to keep women's hems out of the street(and hallway(!) )muck; or that sewage workers' thigh-high boots in 18th century France were of such supple leather after a lifetime of immersion in sewage that when sold to be cut up into fine women's shoes could fund a retirement. My favorite fact from this work was the revelation that an American company testing a high end toilet to compete with those fancy Japanese models found that wasabi paste was the perfect pseudo poop for repeated flush testing. The wasabi company was thrilled with the very large purchase but horrified to find it wasn't going to a restaurant and made the purchasers sign a confidentiality agreement to NEVER mention their name in conjunction with the project. The author also goes into depth on Chinese farmers' use of a semi sealed system with a pig consuming  food and human waste in an under-home unit that also produced heat from methane but the details escape me at this time.


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## feralimal (Jul 1, 2022)

Verity said:


> Back in Europe, it wasn't until around the 1850's when the flush cistern became accepted, around the time of London's 'Great Stink' in 1858.
> There seems to have been some sort of disconnect as folks flocked to the cities, where waste was evidently an afterthought.
> The industrial revolution flooded the cities in more ways than one.



You could make the argument, that in restructuring waste in the way shown in the photo above which breaks a natural cycle, you are bound to create an environmental potential hazard.  Perhaps this is a natural consequence of moving lots of people into high density areas.

Once the cycle is broken and you have an urgent need, it is entirely natural that you would then need a large public organisation to manage the sewage.  People will want someone or something to do something - government will step in.  And people will be thankful.

I have to wonder, when the solution works so well for the vested interests (ie it increases government power and authority), whether the creation of the problem was accidental, or intentional.

And when you think that composting toilets are a pretty low-tech, sanitary option:


> The idea is simple: treat human waste just as other organic matter – in a not dissimilar way to how kitchen waste is composted.


(from The no-flush movement: the unexpected rise of the composting toilet (ignore the eco-wash))

it seems even more plausible that the sewage system is part of the control system.


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