Anthropocene Living Room

Water is a resource that I often take for granted. I take daily showers, wash my dishes, and do my laundry without a second thought to the amount or quality of water that is used. I only experience small aspects of the natural water cycle on a daily basis, from a bit of condensation on a cold glass of water to the sporadic downfall of rain that occurs in Pittsburgh. The water cycle that I’ve learned about in school can be boiled down to: precipitation, surface runoff, infiltration, evaporation, and condensation; but how do I, as a human being, fit into all of this? What is the human water cycle and how have parts of the water cycle changed within the Anthropocene?

As intrigued as I was, I didn’t know enough about my own impact on the water cycle, so I took a deeper dive into learning about what was actually happening to the water that I used. In order to explore the concept of the human water cycle I needed to start by looking at infrastructure. In the case of water infrastructure, outside of irrigation, the water purification systems and sewage systems are some of the most impactful additions human beings have included into the planet’s water cycle. These infrastructural systems span thousands and thousands of miles underground, connecting houses, neighborhoods, and cities. And yet, at least for me, there was a vast mental disconnect between the water that flows underneath us and the water that we consume. I wasn’t sure how to visualize something that was happening underground, hidden away from sight. That’s when I learned about fatbergs.

In 2017 an 820 foot long mass weighing 130 metric tons was discovered in the sewers of Whitechapel in London, England. The same type of mass, weighing 42 metric tons was found in Melbourne, Australia during the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus, most likely due to the flushing of “toilet paper substitutes” (i.e. paper towels, sanitary products, facial tissues). These masses are called fatbergs and can be found in most major cities, especially those with older sewage systems like Pittsburgh. A fatberg is a solidified mass of fat, formed overtime in sewers, that sticks to the build-up of un-flushable sewage. Fatbergs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to remove, and also reduce river and stream water quality by making sewer overflows more likely. In the Pittsburgh Area, whenever the combined storm and sanitary sewer system is overloaded, excess flow is dumped directly into the rivers.

Fatbergs are a human phenomenon that directly impacts both us and the greater environment. The sewer overflows that they cause impact both the built and natural environment, introducing pollutants such as human waste from our toilets and fats from our kitchen sinks into the living domain. But as harmful as they are, they can be easily prevented.

How, you ask? The solution is simple… don’t flush down anything other than toilet paper and bodily waste. But why? What makes toilet paper any different from other paper-like materials? The answer lies in the unique quality of the material that toilet paper is made up of. Unlike paper towels that use long fiber pulps, which improves the strength and absorptivity of the material, and facial tissues that contain additives that hold the fibers together, toilet paper is made using approximately 70% hardwood pulps with short fibers and 30% softwood pulps with longer fibers. Due to the hardwood pulps, once the toilet paper makes contact with water, the short fibers, which also help keep the toilet paper soft to touch, are able to untangle and fall away into smaller fragments, eventually dissolving into tiny bundles of short fiber that can easily flow through the sewage system.

Objects like ‘flushable wipes’, unlike toilet paper, take hours to days to break down. This means that just because we are able to flush something down, doesn’t necessarily make it safe for sewer and septic systems. If you want to try an experiment to explore this concept, try putting ‘flushable’ wipes and toilet paper into two separate containers of water. See for yourself what happens.

Fatbergs are all the more relevant to us during the times of the pandemic, especially in the United States. As people stay home, more objects that aren’t healthy for the sewage system are being flushed. Think about the times you flushed anything other than toilet paper. Are you feeding a potential fatberg in your neighborhood?

Daniel Noh is an intern for the Center for Anthropocene Studies, Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

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There are more than 326 million trillion gallons of water on our planet. Our bodies are made up of around 60% water. Even the air that we breathe has water vapors in it. Water is everywhere, but the water we can use is limited. According to the National Groundwater Association, the Earth is made up of about 71% water. Out of that, 99.7% is trapped in oceans, icecaps, soil, and the atmosphere. That leaves us with around 0.3% of the Earth’s water to use and drink. The same water that all living and nonliving things have used again and again since water has been on the planet.

Every morning I go downstairs to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of cold water from a water filter. Without a second thought, I drink the water because I consider this water to be safe. After all, the porous, activated carbon filters absorb various chemicals, including chlorine, lead, and mercury, which ‘purifies’ the water. Furthermore, I don’t have to worry about what could be in the water, because I know that the water is thoroughly cleaned before it enters the house. But how is it cleaned? Where does this water come from and what does it go through in order to splash into my kitchen sink?

Let’s start with a broader concept: rivers. Most major cities can be found along rivers: Paris along the Seine River, London along the River Thames, Seoul along the Han River, and New York along the Hudson River. This is no surprise, as communities need fresh, drinking water as an essential part of building a city. Pittsburgh is no different. In fact, in Pittsburgh, two rivers, the Monongahela and the Allegheny form a third, the Ohio, which on its passage through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, is the primary water source for over five million people. Within the city, the Allegheny River provides us, the people of Pittsburgh, with fresh water that we use on a daily basis.

If my water comes from the Allegheny River, what’s the difference between drinking tap water and river water? That’s where the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, or the PWSA, enters the picture. PWSA is the organization in charge of providing quality water throughout the city of Pittsburgh. The organization’s drinking water system “contains approximately 965 miles of water lines, five reservoirs, and 11 tanks with a water storage capacity of 455 million gallons” (pgh2o.com). And their process for making clean water looks like this. First, the collected river water is coagulated using ferric chloride, potassium permanganate, carbon, and catatonic polymer, which react to the polluting particles in the water, causing them to stick and clump together. The water is then taken through the filtration process, where it flows through pulverized anthracite coal and sand to remove any of the remaining particles. Afterwards, the water is disinfected with sodium hypochlorite, a type of chlorine compound that is used to remove microbial particles. Lastly, once the water has been completely purified, fluoride, the processed form of a naturally occurring mineral, is added back into the water as recommended by the Center for Disease Control to prevent tooth decay.

As complex as this purification process is, it isn’t perfect. The quality of the water that we receive is affected by what we put into it and there are countless compounds that cannot be completely filtered out by the processes used in water treatment plants. For example, trace amounts of dioxane, a likely human carcinogen from plastic manufacturing runoff, can be found in Pittsburgh’s own water system. Moreover, as of 2019, the PWSA has introduced orthophosphate in order to reduce lead levels, originating from the city’s ancient water pipes, in our tap water. In the end, all the water treatment plants can do is clean the water, test for contaminants, and research new ways to produce and deliver as clean a product as possible. The rest is up to us, the community. It’s up to us to be cautious of how we treat water by watching what we flush, preventing littering, or even reducing plastic use to reduce both microplastics and plastic production.

Water treatment is a growing process; new methods to remove previously unfilterable chemicals are constantly being discovered. With this in mind, think about your relationship with water. How do you treat it? What kind of objects do you flush down the toilet? What are your direct and indirect interactions with our water system? All of our actions matter. Because what we put into the river, will eventually come back to us.

Daniel Noh is an intern for the Center for Anthropocene Studies, Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.

Resources

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-purest-of-them-all/

https://www.portpitt.com/pages/monongahela-river

https://www.wpxi.com/news/what-you-need-to-know-about-pittsburghs-three-rivers/739536503/

http://www.orsanco.org/river-facts/

https://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/ask/67-How-much-water-does-Earth-have-#:~:text=There%20are%20more%20than%20326,in%20ice%20caps%20and%20glaciers

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