Many areas outside of our major cities do not have a municipal sewer system, and instead rely on individual septic systems to drain and treat their waste water. In some ways a septic tank is a pretty "green" system. But not if it is mistreated.
Of course not everybody knows how a septic tank works. They think it is a magical place where you can dump just any old thing and expect it to be "taken care of". This is typical of an uninformed attitude towards the environment.
The truth is, septic systems don't use magic to get rid of solid and semi-solid waste material. They use bacteria to break down waste matter - mostly human feces and certain types of bio-degradable paper - and they do an admirable job of it most of the time. But there are some things that the bacterial action in a septic tank will simply not break down.
In my childhood I lived in a small town near Niagara Falls where most of the houses in town were built within a short distance of a creek. From one end of town to the other sewer pipes and a good number of open sewer ditches connected the homes to the creek. Talk about an environmentally challenged system!
Some of these ditches carried the runoff from septic tanks. But in other cases the ditches were connected right up to the drain pipes from homes with no septic tank between the toilet and the ditch.
The result was pretty disgusting - raw sewage running in open ditches. This "system" was not all bad because the ditches themselves tended to act as cleansing agents. The solid matter in the sewage from the houses would settle on the bottom of the ditch and eventually break down into a black foul-smelling ooze. The liquid would either evaporate or run along the ditch and eventually flow into the creek. That is more or less what happens with a septic tank.
But not all was well with the ditch system. When I was a young boy of about 10 or 12 my friends and I spent a good deal of our time exploring the creek. Like good CSI agents we could not help but notice that stuff floating in the open ditches, and it often gave us clues about the lives of the people living in those houses.
You can use your imagination to picture what those people might have been flushing down their toilets. Some were made of heavy-duty absorbent paper materials. Others were made of rubber or vinyl. Some of them may still be floating in the Atlantic Ocean after flowing down the Niagara River, down the St. Lawrence and out to the sea.
This experience taught me at least two important things about life in a town with open ditches, and both of them can be summed up in the aphorism: "Be careful what you flush down your toilet."
While it's true that things have changed a lot since those days, the dynamics of sewage drains and septic tanks is still pretty much the same. Which means the next time you're tempted to flush some greasy gooey stuff, or something made of cardboard or rubber or plastic or vinyl down your toilet, think of those open ditches with all that tell-tale stuff floating in them.
That's exactly the way those things will look in your septic tank. Except they're not going to float away into the river or settle to the bottom of the ditch. They'll stay there until your tank stops working. And in some cases they'll get into your weeping bed and plug that up too.
