We need a Conversation on Poop.
As always, I have written this piece in Markdown within Obsidian, so if you plan to keep this piece, its ready to paiste into a new note, and allow you to either follow my links or make your own.
If [[Climate Change]] brings about anything, it brings about the need to consider [[Rainfall]] and the huge climb in volume [[Climate Change ]]has brought. This together with a massive rise in hard [[none permeable surfaces ]]preventing the soil and underlying substructure absorbing rainwater and shedding water to drainage channels, bypassing a slow route to rivers and the sea. Pipes now transport large volumes of water very quickly the the rivers, forcing almost instant expansion.
But with rising [[ground water ]]levels and [[Rivers]] that can not expand quickly enough, we need to take a step back and understand the problem as a whole not in small unrelated chunks, this includes [[energy retention]] as warm waste water leave a building, we need to decide if it can be recycled and can we harvest any energy from it.
In this introduction to SUD’S, I outline the problem and the way forward in the Advanced book, I take the subject apart to look at it in detail, with construction methods to solve many of the problems
A Need to Conserve
Earth is often referred to as the water planet, yet the water we have is all there is, we do not make it, yet we treat is as if it is renewable. It is not. Therefore we need to understand what we have, and realise the small percent we can use for drinking, and that’s not just humans, all life.
The total surface area of the Earth is 510 million Km2, over 361 million km2 is taken by the world oceans, leaving only 149 million Km2 for land, where all of the potable water is found, the sea being salt water and unless treated can not be consumed.
Just what’s there
Lets start with the water list, where Water is Found and the Percentage :
- Oceans 97.2%
- Ice Caps/Glaciers 2.0%
- Groundwater 0.62%
- Freshwater Lakes 0.009%
- Inland seas/salt lakes 0.008%
- Atmosphere 0.001%
- Rivers 0.0001%
- TOTAL 99.8381%
What we have is it, we can’t make more, once we pollute it we can’t make more, and in so many cases we can’t clean it
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It’s clear, that using potable water to flush wc’s or clean your car is a misuse of a rare commodity. Keeping potable water for our use to cook and drink is the priority. Shower and bath water together with sinks, excluding the kitchen sink and dish washer, can be reused to flush the WC, add duel flushing for urinal or solid flushing adds to the efficiency.
Storing rainwater from rainwater gutters, off flat of pitched roof and also be used to supplement and keep stores of recyclable water.
Known as grey water, domestic or industrial / commercial storage can be kept underground; filters and chemical cleaning remove a lot of the contamination ready to return to the premises and used to flush the WC, and be available to water the garden, and clean the car.
Storing water is also a way to reduce the pressure on storm water pipes, when a storm arrives.
Modern Architecture has managed to pave most of our cities with concrete or asphalt preventing the natural path of rainwater seeping slowly through the earth to rivers, often with little or no management with obvious flooding.
The paving of our cities with impermeable material has prevented the natural cycle, forcing large volumes of water to be channelled through pipes direct to the rivers, overloading them to the point of not being able to cope with the rapid increase in volume.
Climate change or the warming of the planet, has meant that the warmer atmosphere can absorb or hold more water, resulting in an increase in rainfall volume, adding to the already overloaded sewage system.
Recycling of Water
SUD’s is a method of trying to assist in several areas of protecting our water supply. First is the redirection of water from our roofs away from the sewage or storm water pipes and storing it in underground tanks to be used for replacing fresh palatable water in the flushing of toilets, and urinals, and other processes that do not need pure drinking water .
Second is the slowing down of water shed by the vast landscape of impermeable hard wearing surfaces to the rivers, by the use of [[Retention Tanks]], large underground spaces under gardens, parks and so often carparks, a classic example is the use of Supermarket carparks. Where water from the carpark, and the often huge flat roofs is collected under the carpark and released slowly to the drainage systems rivers and ultimately the sea.
Drainage system and waste water Treatment Plant
Most cities have a number of treatment plans to take mankind’s waste and polluted water and return it to the sea clean and fit for all life consumption. The plants are spread over vast areas, filtering and removing waste, mostly by allowing natural bacteria to eat the waste, producing a byproduct that can be put back onto the land as fertiliser.
Most plants are located so as to use the natural lie of the land to gravity feed the plants with both Storm or foul water.
Rivers
Rivers were the transport motorways of the early industrial revolution, and before that, the only means of transporting goods easily to cities. The rise in concrete or Asphalt motorways and the fossil fuels to drive cars and heavy good vehicles as let so many countries to neglect the river systems. Rivers are no longer seen as transport routes, so the need to dredge and maintain them has declined, resulting in the volume of water reducing significantly. The need of an ever growing population has forced the confinement of river courses, again reducing the amount of rain water runoff that can be handled.
Wetlands
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[[Wetlands]] and [[water meadows]], the natural runoff for rivers, have been used for development, again containing the rivers and adding yet more hard landscaping to shed even more rainwater. Yet they offer rivers a way of natural expanding. Farmers gain from the silt left behinds and the grass soon picks up leaving lush meadows for cattle.
Retention ponds
They can be seen on the edges of so many motorways, large industrial estates and small villages, as part of the local water management as a permanent pool of water for local wildlife, but more as protection against flooding.
Reservoirs
Large areas of land have fortunately been set aside to act as reservoirs to collect water for human consumption, yet they are often areas that were once the location of Small villages, the valley they were located in dammed and flooded.
The location of these areas are often adjacent to towns offering a good supply of waster
Ground Water
Water does not just lie or run on the earth’s surface, a large often unknown, quantity of water is stored in permeable layers under the ground, often many meters below the surface. Boreholes are sunk to find this water, to be pumped up to reservoirs, adding to the local water supply
Soft or Hard Water
Water that is collected in open reservoirs are often filled with soft water, that is water with a low or small quantity of of calcium, magnesium, and certain other metal cations. Hard Water is often water from bore holes that has passed through strata that allowed the water to pick up often high levels of of calcium, magnesium, and certain other metals to make the water hard. Soft water, from lakes and rainwater, uses less soap to lather, it leaves the skin feeling smooth and hair that is soft and bouncy. Hard water is the complete opposite, little of no lathering from soap, and lives the skin feeling hard.
Hard water is also a destroyer of water delivery system, Large commercial or industrial complexes often try to remove these impurities as the leave deposits or what’s known a fir within the pipes, reducing the water supply to sinks, wc’s. Households are not often protected and suffer badly from furring in hard water areas
Farming
Farmers can and so often do have a massive role to play in the effective management of water on their farms, from the creation of small retention ponds, to allowing fields adjacent to rivers to be used as water meadows.
But the fertilisers used in keeping crop yields high often run off the land into water courses feeding weeds, which results yet more reduction of water volume and flow.
But farming can not get of that lightly, many farms rely on huge volumes of water being sprayed onto the land, a lot evaporates, a lot just runs off the land, only a small percentage is actually consumed by the plants.
This give rise to Vertical Farming, buildings designed to farm a lot of crops, in trays vertically , water, sunlight and nutrients are controlled with water reissued as it drains to the bottom of the building, air is dried to the correct humidity and the water as condensate again recycled. Solar panels on the roof provide the energy to run the lamps, air conditioning, and computers that rum the control system, fed by an enormous array of sensors.
Oceans
Architecture as a whole often dismisses the oceans, yet Great Britain is an island surrounded by the Atlantic, North Sea and the Chanel. Our weather as you will read about in Chapter 5 is largely controlled by the sea. Our land area is often reduced because of the action of the sea. Towns and cities that populate the coastal areas fight hard to retain their harbours and sea fronts, with large concrete structures. And are surprised when the seas overcomes these defences and destroys the buildings that are far to close to the defence walls, Planners should understand this and look at ways of adding salt marsh’s as a natural defence, in front of the defence walls, or making new reefs to dissipate the path of oncoming storms.
Polar Regions
The poles have been the repository of vast amounts of fresh water, all be it frozen, and ignored, except for the odd iceberg or cold wind sweeping down to freeze the UK. But now Climate change is melting both polar region’s, we need to make the poles a priority. That vast volume of palatable water is adding to the sea levels, and it will have devastating effects to sea defences outlined above. Also its playing havoc on the salinity of the oceans,
This subject will be expanded in the Advanced book with in-depth details and construction methods and products to store, clean , filter rain water and utilise tits reuse and save water.
Water Supply
As towns grew into cities, so did the need for water for drinking, early supplies came from wells and pumps, but the leaching of human waste and chemicals into the water table saw a huge increase in fatal diseases like cholera, so alternatives were needed, this took the form of water stores that held back large volumes of river water in the form of lakes, or the piping in of water from areas away from the city, Birmingham purchasing a large lake in the welsh hills and transporting the water via pipes and streams to the centre of Birmingham, with filter stations cleaning the water near the area of supply.
A Mixed Bag
Its clear, SUDS is not just putting collection tanks to collect water from a roof and using it t flush WC’s neither is it the concrete and tarmac jungle of big cities, its a whole lot more.
I refer back to my opening statement, the water we have is all we have, and only a small percentage is deemed palatable, and this small percent is not just for human consumption its for trees, plants humans and all the other animals and insects.
You might see I have missed of fish, well they rely on a salt water environment, adding fresh water to the sea, disrupts that balance, not just their living environment, but the the retention of heat, salt water acts differently to fresh water.
Wlist I am of the subject of the sea, we might as well take a look at methods to take salt water and turn it into palatable water fit for many uses. But, there is always a but, to turn salt water into palatable water we need to use a system called [[desalination]], a method of using high volumes of energy to evaporate the water leaving a high salt content slurry thats pushed back into the sea. This upsets the already finely balanced ecosystem and layering of our oceans.
A lot of our sewage systems date back to victorian engineers, who, good as they were, could not foresee the exponential climb in populations, and the effects of Climate change, leaving under sized pipes, that have lost their correct fall due to natural movement of the sub-soil.
But SUD’S is a good start, we now need to expand our thinking on palatable water, retention systems to include individual retention, as well as village / city retention, flooding, river management, water meadows, farming, treatment plants, Victorian sewage systems, and here I mention Black water, a vast problem, that needs more treatment plants, and perhaps a rethink on our attitude to poop, out of sight, and smell is not the answer.
Foul Water
Most people flush a toilet and do not think what that action entails, a large volume of water is needed to transport the solids and paper through often miles of under ground pipes to treatment plants. The fall of that pipe is crucial to it transporting the solids without it sinking or not having sufficient depth. But, the pipes often get used to transport not just poop or soft tissue, but a host of waste products that should be placed in proper refuse bins. this additional waste was never meant to be included, and so often clogs up a the pipe network.
But we have to ask the question, is a Victorian system of pipes, and sewage plants run with a diminishing supply of fresh palatable water the modern solution to the problem. Flushing with none palatable water is certainly a solution.
Big cities, and I live in Birmingham in the UK, that has a population if we include the West Midlands of roughly 4.3 million people, a good proportion of them get up at roughly the same time and perform the same bodily function. Our sewage systems have peaks and troughs. with that volume linked to so many people it does not take much to disrupt a finely balanced network. Add a rainstorm with a high volume, and a victorian system that is often a combination of [[Storm water]] and [[foul water]] pipes often sized to Victorian populations, links to the same plant, that was not designed to handle loads of this type, its no wonder rivers often get used to take the overflow of foul and storm water. Which is not acceptable in the 21st century.
You can see that Ileave this article with little or no conclusion, except for SUD’s its not perfect, but I think its heading in the right direction. It certainly needs more research, and a heap of money to modernise our aging networks. May I also add, its not a one discipline problem its a cross professional problem, that needs Planning, Engineers, Architects, conservationists, and I might add researchers to look at this problem and come up with ideas.
I have a link to my Scays.co.uk website that includes several presentation on the subject, Now I have written this small piece, I plan to update them and add to the collection.
