Monday, June 27, 2005

Sewers are Sensational

Canadian Business has an interesting article on a topic much on peoples' minds in the developing world: sewers. Did you know this: "Mumbai delivers an estimated 2.2 billion litres of largely untreated sewage into its harbour and the neighbouring Arabian Sea every day."

No shit!

Well, actually, yes shit.

Sewers can be life and death matters for the poor.

2 comments:

Zrazys said...

Couldn't all that sewage, at least the organic matter be composted into soil? Perhaps it would be several years before it could be used for growing food for humans, but it would seem to be a great way to improve soils in India.

rn said...

Zrazys: 'Yes, but....' Yes, composting is possible. But Mumbai'd need an extremely large plot of land on which to do the composting. And given the outrageous cost of land in the city, that would be tough to find. Also, as you imply, any composting operation would have to develop an efficient way of separating inorganic from organic items in the sludge.