Since humans began the practice of leaving the firepit to squat behind the bushes, we have been trying to get away from our own waste.  The process is now fully industrialized and, thanks to the flush, we almost never even have to see the evil that our body must purge daily.  Out of sight, out of mind.

Is this progress? Do we really benefit from the denial of self?

The truth is that our waste never really goes away.  It goes down a gravity fed eight inch pipe, connects to a sewer pipe which leads to a waste water treatment plant, which is generally at a geological low point in the region.

When filming Transposition at the Municipal Utility District in Trophy Club, Texas, I was able to see the entire operation first hand.

Two products are exported from the plant: reclaimed (non-potable) water and biosolids.  Various mechanical processes separate the solids from the liquids.  The water is sifted and treated with bacteria and travels under a UV light to kill the bacteria and finally pours into a lake.  This water is almost safe to drink.  After spending a few months in the lake it is pumped into a water treatment plant.  The water goes through the same processes as in the waste water plant, but the digesters and purifiers are all enclosed.  It gets sent up a pipe, back into your house, or to a factory to be put into a bottle and sold to you.

Jeff Richey sums it up nicely in Transposition “We clean it up and you’re drinking it again.”

The solids are laid out to dry, out of direct sunlight.  If the solids are laid in an enclosed building, they are eligible to become fertilizer and resold.  In the case of Trophy club M.U.D. they simply truck the stuff out to a dump.

 

When early man noticed that his favorite edible plants began growing from his latrine, it sparked a revolution called farming.  The bushes that we were squatting behind, actually grew out of our waste.  Civilization as we know can from this very simple observation of a natural processes, of which we are all a part.

We have systematically removed ourselves from bodily knowledge, like a reversion into the utopia garden of eden.  We don’t want to know that 91% of the cells in our body are microorganisms and that 85% of the DNA we can call human is identical to mouse DNA.  We want to feel special and self sufficient.  The fact that we need to evacuate smelly brown stuff from our bodies is a secret we want to keep from others and even ourselves, but it is the truth.

Jeff Richey on Jazz: “I think it should sound pretty… and sometimes it sounds darn, right ugly!”