The US Has a Scary Sewage Problem: Let's Clean It Up and Jumpstart the Economy While We're at It

Sunday, 10 August 2014 12:15
By Gar Alperovitz, AlterNet | Op-Ed

The problem is simple, surprising, and quite honestly disgusting: Our nation’s older cities depend largely on sewage treatment systems that overflow when it rains, dumping 860 billion gallons of raw sewage a year into “fresh” water across the country—enough to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania an inch deep.

This problem is very, very real for people like Lori Burns in Chicago, whose basement full of sewage and "climate change maggots" recently found its way into the Washington Post. Or for the people of Toledo, where a chronic "combined sewer overflow" problem has combined with runoff from industrial agriculture to drastically alter the ecological balance of Lake Erie, with toxic algal blooms making the city's drinking water poisonous.

But the stormwater crisis is also a tremendous opportunity to move in the direction of a new, community sustaining local economy.