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Sure It Stinks, But Think Of The Convenience! Great Lakes Declared One Big Toilet
Sorry, kids, you’re gonna have to put your bathing suits back in the drawer for a century or so. Environmental organization Sierra Legal has released its first ever Great Lakes Sewage Report Card, and while the sewage is doing well, the lakes are not.
The report rates 20 cities around the Great Lakes on how well they manage their sewage, and the results are not encouraging. In spite of multiple highly-publicized clean up programs since the 1970’s, 90 billion litres of untreated human waste are dumped into the Great Lakes annually. For a more brain-grabbing visual, that’s the equivalent of about 100 Olympic-sized swimming pools full of urine and feces every day. As a result of this cavalcade of crap, “waters surrounding urban areas are…still commonly unsafe for recreational usage, and many parts of the vast freshwater ecosystem are in peril.”
The report also notes that the lake system cleanses itself at the rate of about 1% a year, so even if we stopped dumping our shit in there tomorrow, it would be decades before you could go for a dip and not risk an encounter with something you’d flushed away earlier.
Toronto scored a “C” in the survey, which puts us below the middle of the pack. Peel region redeemed the GTA environmental rep slightly by achieving a “B”, leaving the 905ers in 2nd spot after Green Bay, Wisconsin. There were no “A”s awarded.
One of the principal causes of untreated sewage going into the lakes is that most cities use pipes which combine the flow from storm and sanitary sewers. During heavy rainfalls, the drains often overflow their capacity and bypass treatment to run straight into the lake. Of the twenty cities surveyed, only 4 have separate drainage systems and 3 of those cities – Peel Region, Green Bay, and Duluth MN – were the top 3 listed.
Toronto currently has no plans – or money – to rebuild the sewage system. However, as reported in Torontoist, there is a contest to design artistic manhole covers, and that will have to do for now.
Image concept courtesy Marc Lostracco