Re:Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research
by WorldMaker on Wednesday November 07, 2018 @12:05PM
(#18400460)
Also, some US states are encountering issues with bio contamination in their aquifers and as water issues become more prevalent (perennial droughts in some states shrinking aquifers making them less resilient to contamination; perennial flooding in others moving the water tables closer to septic tanks and making them more prone to contamination), the requirements to isolate septic tanks from local ecologies will only grow (ie, increasingly more counties will require to close them, watertight protect them, require them to be regularly pumped moving forward, and/or replace them with a connection to nearby sewage systems).
Re:Gates Foundation spent $200M funding toilet research
by dogma1138 on Wednesday November 07, 2018 @05:47PM
(#18403028)
Yes the ground water level, soil permutability, distance to water sources etc. has a lot of implications on what sceptic system you can implement and I would bet that many tanks are put in without much regulation or oversight.
Other areas like those in which ground temperatures drop below freezing for long period of time might also require tight tanks and constant pumping since the cold may stop the reaction in the tank so it would surprise me if tanks in places like say N. Dakota would be pumped year before winter to prevent them from freezing shut and overflowing.
Septic tanks are not closed systems they are open and intended to provide an environment that can produce a bio-reactor while maintaining drainage through the soil.
Many good systems don’t need to be drained other than every few decades in fact good systems would outlast the tank and the filtering substrate it’s built on so when the time comes you need to dig out the tank and the gravel and other filtering particulate it used because that is what has degraded.
The problem with septic tanks is that they don’t scale we’ll have one on a large property in the middle no where that 5 people use and it’s a great solution have a bunch of them and worse over use one in particular and you get a polluting mess.
But septic tanks also don’t solve the other problem with western toilets and that is the amount of water they consume which is simply unfeasible for many developing regions.
TLDR; if the septic tank was installed and sized correctly it will outlast you even without pumping it, but it’s not a solution the reason we don’t use them in cities is because they don’t and can’t scale with urban population densities.