The waterborne sanitation systems that the West continues to export to many areas of the world are unsustainable and ultimately dangerous. It makes no sense to use precious drinking water to transport feces and urine to sewage plants, where it mixes with toxic industrial chemicals. Treatment is expensive and necessarily incomplete. Liquid is released into downstream waterways. Semi solid sludge is spread on agricultural land in North America, a practice outlawed in most European countries. The problems with the status quo are water pollution, reliance on fossil fuels that diminishes air quality, and soil contamination that compromises both future food security and current food safety.
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Closing the Loop: Ecological Sanitation for Food Security This overview illustates how current sanitation practice is putting the world at risk of disease and starvation and how cycling nutrients through ecosan practice can restore health to soils and water . Steven A. Esrey Ingvar Andersson Astrid Hillers Ron Sawyer , 2004. 107 pages black and white.
