Today, Explained - Our No. 2 problem

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

America’s sewage system is total crap, but there’s a new plumber in town. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600.

Visit connectsontario.ca. Infrastructure, infrastructure week. It's infrastructure week on Today Explained. On Monday, we talked about politics. On Tuesday, we talked about trains. And today, we're going to talk about toilets. I'm Chelsea Wald. I'm a science writer and the author of a new book called Pipe Dreams, The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet. Chelsea has traveled the world trying to understand toilets, and she says the sewage system in the United States is total crap. The American Society of Civil Engineers has given U.S. wastewater infrastructure a D+, which is a pretty low grade.

And there was only one way to find out how we ended up with that grade. We had to flush ourselves. The water will come out with the flush of the basin and go into the toilet bowl and push us out through the pipes and down into the sewer where we get added to all of the wastewater that's coming out of the house. All of that goes to the same place into the sewer pipe that the house is connected to and it gets added to all of the wastewater from the houses around you or

the other apartments in your building. One of the things that happens is that people flush things that they aren't supposed to flush, or they put things down drains that aren't meant to go down the drain. So one of the big problems that many sewer systems are having at the moment, especially older sewer systems, you know, that really can't handle this, is that people are flushing items that are labeled as flushable but actually don't dissolve in the water. Wet ones, moist towelettes.

They're convenient because they pop up. Johnson & Johnson dental floss every day. Nothing gets the plaque between teeth and undergums better. Then I got a hint. You're a friend. Playpen tampon, she said. What a difference. Trojan. Latent tampon, she said. What a difference. Trojan Man.

Trojan Man. What are you doing here? I'm here for her pleasure. For what? Trojan Her Pleasure condoms. They're new. Uniquely engineered to satisfy a woman's anatomical sensitivity. Some of it, you know, you would think is flushable because you flush it and it goes down.

Or it may even be labeled flushable and it seems like toilet paper-ish. Well, that will go down and can snag on rough parts on the sewer, which is especially a problem in older sewer systems. Massive buildup of waste is causing a major stink in London's old Victorian sewer. And then that can mix with fats, oils, and grease that people put down the sink. So say we're in the sewer and we're flowing by a restaurant district. A place with a lot of fast food joints. And they don't have the grease interceptors that they're supposed to have in their restaurants. And someone just puts this oil from the fryer down the drain.

And it goes into the sewer, and it all can start getting mixed up together. It can all kind of start accreting. And it can turn into a fatberg. Like an iceberg, but made of fats. Me fatberg. Me oil, fat fat plus wet wipes! The wet wipes are part of what kind of binds it together. And a fat bird can have like a lot of different consistencies.

It can be very kind of goopy or it can actually get really hard like a rock. And it can grow and grow and grow. To break up the chunk that weighs as much as 11 double-decker buses, workers are using high-pressured jets and doing the rest by hand. It has to be cleaned out because this actually just becomes an enormous sewer clog. But me like it here! When you have a big sewer clog and the water can't flow through,

then you get backups into people's basements or coming out into the street. And that's increasingly a problem. It's costing cities tons and tons of money every year. Thames water workers say they clear 80,000 blockages from the system every year at a cost of over a million dollars a month. And that's of course costs that get passed on to the rate payer.

So maybe we make it past a growing fatberg, but then we'll encounter other discharges along the way. Here comes a discharge from someone's washing machine. And what we know now is what's coming out of washing machines along with sort of soap and water is a lot of microfibers. Those are microplastics, and those flow also to the wastewater treatment plant, and then can end up in waterways

or back in the environment, because if the wastewater treatment plant isn't able to filter them out. You know, as we flow along, we might encounter an industrial discharge, maybe from a manufacturing plant upstream of some kind. You know, they're also allowed, in many cases, to discharge to the sewer.

And out of those can come various chemicals, some of them regulated, some of them unregulated. Of concern most recently have been the class of chemicals known as PFAS. My full name is per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. The people who created me in a lab call me PFAS for short, which are sometimes called forever chemicals. You can find me in stain protectants or nonstick cookware. I keep your clothes sharp and your pans pristine.

And those have made it into the sewers. Those are new chemicals, wastewater treatment plant. Technology isn't designed to handle. That's becoming an increasing headache for utilities and troubling for people who are worried about these chemicals and the environment and their effect on human health and on ecosystems. And then, you know, we're floating along. Everything's, you know, kind of okay.

We're dissolving in the water. And it starts to rain. And this could be a problem depending on the kind of sewer system we're in. Some sewer systems, many of them, especially older sewer systems, for example, on the East Coast in the US, are combined sewer systems. And that means that they combine all this wastewater from households and businesses with stormwater.

New York City streets underwater, cascading into subway stations. Drivers stranded on a flooded expressway rescued by a police barrier truck. In Philadelphia, heavy rain... And even in some places, a little bit of rain can then start to overwhelm the system. And you don't want to do that because if you send too much water to the wastewater treatment plant, it will overwhelm the plant and then it can't do its job. And so these older systems do what they're designed to do, which is discharge some of the extra water that the plant can't handle directly into rivers or local water bodies. And so the sewer starts filling up. We start

kind of moving faster and feeling, you know, feeling very full. And we get to the pipe that's supposed to take us to the wastewater treatment plant, but this time it's not meant to be, and we're discharged into the river. Ah! Along with all of that other stuff that's traveling with us. So it's you, me, some dental floss, some sewage, some storm water, and some microplastics and some forever chemicals flowing out into the river

and eventually some ocean. Yeah, floating away. I gotta ask, this doesn't seem ideal. How do we get to the point where this is the best we can do with our toilets and sewage today? I think of toilets as a paradox because they are kind of miraculous, right? I mean, before toilets, cities were regularly hit with terrible outbreaks of diseases like cholera and typhoid fever. And toilets and the systems that they're attached to helped solve that and create the healthy cities that we live in today. And basically what happened was, roughly speaking, the flush toilet was invented.

And that, along with some other developments, meant that wastewater in cities became a problem. So sewers had to be added to that. And London built kind of this model comprehensive sewer system that then took all of this waste out of the city. And other cities followed that lead. In the early 20th century, the sort of modern wastewater treatment technology was developed, which uses microbes to break down sewage and, you know, kind of clean it and turn it into clean water and a solid residue. And that's the core technology that still remains today. It's undergone some advances,

but we're sort of building on that technology that's more than 100 years old. Because the people who developed this system didn't have some of the challenges of the 21st century in mind, it's not necessarily up for the challenges that we're facing today. How does the American sewage system compare to the sewage systems abroad? I think that many countries are struggling with their sewers. In London, they are struggling with these old sewers. I mean, they are the capital of fatbergs. The capital of fatbergs. The capital of fatbergs.

Well, that's where the Thames Flesher's, which is what they call their sewer workers, they coined the term fatberg, as far as I know. So here it is, the last remaining part of the Whitechapel fatberg, safely encased in not one, but two very thick glass boxes. The oils have been air dried, so it's almost like a rock now. But in its greasy grip, things like sweetie wrappers are sticking out. It's also hatched its own flies. That being said, I mean, the U.S. is having particular struggles with its wastewater infrastructure due to chronic underfunding,

you know, the sewers and the wastewater treatment plants. And a lot of them are reaching the end of their lifespan, kind of all at once. And so the infrastructure is, you know, reaching a point where it's often referred to as crumbling and failing. And then there's places in the U.S. that haven't really seen any infrastructure where there isn't access to this kind of centralized system or where it's not appropriate, but where people are sort of left on their own to fund their own sewage system on their property.

And where people can't afford it, they live with raw sewage on their properties in some cases. How do you think you make people care about this? I mean, people probably care a lot more about the cosmetic aspects of this issue, what their toilet looks like, how it functions, how it makes them feel. And, you know, once that flush happens, no one gives a shit. As soon as people are living

in their own sewage, they're really going to start to care. You know, if you start having regular backups of sewage in your basement or sewage on your street, you're going to care. So the question is, you know, can we make people proactively care about the toilet. And right now we're just missing a lot of opportunities to make better use of these systems. Everybody poops. We all use toilets. So if we make toilets better, we can really make everybody's lives better.

Quick break, and then we're going to talk about how to make people's lives better and do the planet a solid by fixing toilets and sewers. Thank you. designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained,

R-A-M-P dot com slash explained, cards issued by Sutton Bank, FDIC terms and conditions apply. the final buzzer. You're always taken care of with a sports book born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sports book worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600

to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Fatberg! All right. America's sewage system once saved us, but now it's basically crap. We've got fatbergs and forever chemicals in the stew, stormwater overflowing our systems. We need to fix it, but we've got fatbergs and forever chemicals in the stew, stormwater overflowing our systems. We need to fix it, but we've got to be proactive, which is historically tough. Scott

Barry's with the U.S. Water Alliance in Washington, D.C. They're all about trying to fix this. And Scott, you have hope we can get the job done? Sean, I got to say, I've been doing this a long time, and I think I have more hope now than I have in the last decade. I mean, the attention that the pandemic has brought to issues around water and wastewater has really resulted in some new and really increased attention by folks like the Biden administration and Congress. And between the large COVID relief packages that have already passed and the potential large infrastructure package that's kind of taking shape right now. Things are on the table now that never would have been on the table like a year and a half ago. And the dollar amounts that are on the table now for solutions would have been like laughable a year and a half ago. So I'm

hopeful that like there's this unique political moment right now to affect some real change in the water sector. The fact that you have folks like the president proposing $111 billion for water infrastructure improvements is a humongous step in the right direction. And something like my organization and others have been working on for decades. So the Biden administration sounds game to spend a lot of money on these issues. Have they been specific about how they would spend said money? So the Biden administration has definitely been interested in spending a lot of money on this issue. And I know they have, there's some specifics in that, like they want to spend something like $45 billion on like replacing all lead service lines. And then

another $56 billion that would be set aside for modernizing water systems, and then another $10 billion on top of that for addressing things like PFAS and rural water concerns. But even amongst that largest chunk, that $56 billion for modernizing water systems, there's not a ton of specificity in the American Jobs Plan, which is what I'm talking about, about what breakdown between drinking water and wastewater, how that money would get to local governments, whether it's through some existing mechanisms that we know, or whether it would be some new kinds of funding. And then all of that gets filtered like a telephone process through Congress. And, you know, what we're going to end up with may not look a whole lot like what the

president proposed earlier this year. Well, it sounds like you've been thinking about this for years. What would you recommend to Congress, to the Biden administration to tackle wastewater specifically? If I had the power, I would dramatically expand and diversify a lot of the federal funding for water infrastructure. And I would embed equity in wastewater decision-making through the whole process. And then like, I suppose the third thing I would do is really, we need to get serious about climate resiliency in the water sector. And I imagine most people have no idea what you're talking about on any three of those fronts. So why don't you further explain?

So I think the first thing you said was you would diversify federal funding for water infrastructure. What does that mean? Just diversify who's getting the money? It's both expanding and diversifying, right? So like the gap between what we're spending on water and wastewater infrastructure and what we need to be spending just to keep pace with the requirements and things like the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act, that was about $81 billion in 2019. So that's a gap and that gap will continue to widen. And as a percentage of all of the spending, the feds have kicked in

less and less. 40 years ago on wastewater, they were picking up the tab for almost a third of our water projects. And now it's about 4%. This has shifted the burden dramatically from funding water or for funding water, rather, almost entirely to local governments. Okay, that seems fair. What about this equity in wastewater decision making? What's that about? It sucks to say it as a water professional, but there are some significant inequities in our water systems in the United States. And policies like redlining that created inequalities above ground, they also exist underground, right? Like the impacts of inadequate wastewater infrastructure from lack of access to in-home plumbing in toilets or sewer systems backing up to things like unswimmable rivers, major

flooding impacts, all of those things affect marginalized communities first and worst. And so I think we need to embed more equitable decision-making mechanics into how we approach our water infrastructure. How do we ensure that happens? We first need to prioritize the limited funding we have so that the communities with the greatest need are the ones that get the most attention. That's not always the case. And then I think the third thing you proposed, developing climate resiliency, probably is the most self-explanatory. With all the hurricanes, flooding we're experiencing,

we are seeing, what, a lot of wastewater spillage into our bodies of water? I think there's a larger issue, right? Like, we need to stop thinking about climate policy and water policy as totally separate animals, right? Like, climate stress is so often felt as water stress and climate change makes every problem in the water sector worse. We need to be equitably planning for these sorts of disasters and improving our post-disaster recovery efforts

or thinking about how we mitigate future impacts and what the role of the water sector is. Part of that is involved in the funding thing that I was talking about in my first prayer to sort of like investing in resilient water systems, but not foisting the burden of investing in those resilient water systems back entirely on local government, like has been the trend over the last several decades. All of these issues you mentioned, Scott, seem sort of intertwined and hard to tackle in such a big country. We've got places that are dealing with floods, and then we've got others dealing with drought. And on top of that, you know, either one has marginalized communities

that might bear the brunt of climate change. Where do we begin? I think this is a big opportunity to potentially rethink how we do water and wastewater systems in this country. A lot of these things are designed for the start of urbanization that happened, you know, in the early 1900s.

And I think we need to start imagining different systems, right? Like, I think that model of, like, deeply centralized water and wastewater treatment and distribution works for the majority of the country. And, you know, it worked for a really long time. But there are a lot of communities in this country. You know, there are over 2 million people in this country that do not have regular access to hot and cold water or a toilet. And that's a lot. And they're in all parts of this country. They're concentrated in pockets.

In rural Alabama, the U.N.'s expert on extreme poverty witnessed firsthand what residents have been dealing with for years. In the Black Belt, in the South. Open pools of raw sewage sit where children play. It's often flushed back into people's homes. And hookworm, a parasite normally found in sub-Saharan Africa, has been reported in shocking numbers. The border colonists along the Texas-Mexico border.

So if there's water flowing here and it hasn't been raining, then that means that this is basically raw sewage, untreated sewage. Or, you know, in places like the Navajo Nation, where there are some significant water and wastewater kind of infrastructure challenges. In more than a third of the homes, the taps are bone dry. We don't use the sink because there's no running water.

Not a drop. Yeah. Our preference for these sort of centralized systems means that those places oftentimes get left behind because they're really spread out. And so, you know, that would require like a tremendously large system for a very small amount of people. Or they're in places like rural Appalachia, where the tremendous amount of mountains between the different communities would require a huge amount of power and effort to move water and wastewater between these sorts of places to a sort of centralized point. So I

think we need to start thinking more about how we invest in technologies or create priorities for existing technologies that help us decentralize some of these systems or create more water reuse systems or think about what the systems of the 21st century should be rather than continuing to build the systems of the 20th century. Scott Berry is the Director of Policy and Government Affairs at the U.S. Water Alliance. You can explore how they're rethinking our water systems at uswateralliance.org. And if you just can't get enough literature on toilets, be sure to check out Pipe Dreams, the urgent global quest to transform the toilet. That's by my favorite flush buddy, Chelsea Wald,

who you heard from in the first half of the show. Infrastructure Week continues on Today Explained. Tomorrow, tell your friends. ¶¶ © transcript Emily Beynon