Creative Reflection: Waste Water

This sketch is my response to the video on human waste, and to some of the ideas Kurt Grimm mentioned in class. One of the most backwards things we do is “poop in our water” as Kurt put it. In developed countries like our own, we use good drinkable tap water to flush down our waste in toilets. My sketch shows how our good water is used in toilets and in turn how that water returns to us as our drinking water. On another level, this drawing also shows how much of the world defecates in the water that they drink. When I reflected on this, I realized just how upside down it was. Why do we contaminate and waste our precious water by putting our waste into it? It doesn’t seem to me to be a rational solution. This sketch is made to get the viewer thinking about their water use, and to realize how a change in human waste management must be made.

Personally, I think that we could change this system by making it closed-loop. Instead of using clean, filtered, drinkable water to flush our toilets, we could instead use greywater that would normally be sent to the sewer. This way we get multiple uses out of our water, and save the clean water for drinking and washing. The problem with this is that we still defecate in our water, making it harder to purify again. In most cases, it never does get completely cleaned through treatment plants, and this still contaminated water gets dumped into the oceans or other waterways. 

A solution to this would be to eliminate the use of water for toilets completely through the implementation of composting toilets. This is not an easy change to make, however, for most houses are set up for the traditional system. Additionally, composting toilets still require materials to function, including sawdust and peat moss, which would have to be produced and purchased. Composting toilets are a great improvement, but the ideal sustainable system is yet to be developed.