When you flush your toilet and dump liquids down your drain… where does it all go?

Down into the sewer everyday: thousands of synthetic chemicals, organic chemicals, every type of pharmaceutical drug, oils, paints, heavy metals, condoms, food wastes, radioactive materials, asbestos, hospital and dental wastes, just to name a few….

I proposed a film on the subject of sewage to the National Film Board of Canada in 1998. My dad was a civil engineer. He was a kind of pioneer engineer in Western Canada. He became President of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and too of the Engineering firm he was a partner in. During summer holidays I would often accompany my dad to southwestern Manitoba to visit small towns and to meet with the operators of town sewage treatment plants. We would drive down dusty gravel roads to locate the town sewage lagoon. Usually the lagoon had tall grasses growing around it surrounded by an old wooden post fence with wire. Ducks often would swimming in there. It was a prairie scene. My dad would typically know the operator of the town plant by name. We would go in and stare down into the sewage digestors. What a stink!

Meanwhile back at home at the dinner table, meal time talk would turn to water purification and sewage waste. Until my mom would say, “Enough!” So it became obvious to me that most folks never give sewage a second thought. Don’t think about keeping toxins out of our water waste streams. Will flush pretty much anything they can down a toilet. And think that it goes “away”.

Away and not their problem.

Worldwide we’ve come to rely on the sewer to rid ourselves of almost anything that can be carried away by water. Once our wastes are flushed away they become the problem of whoever is at the end of the pipe. But this technology we’ve inherited to clean up after ourselves often is compounding our waste problems. The sewer is proving to be an outdated, expensive and arguably ineffective system. With the ever-growing use of chemicals in our industries and homes, we have created a sewage system which ‘turbocharges’ these chemicals into our water and into our food cycles.

We have become locked into a technological trap with the sewer.

This 52 minute documentary contemplates the evolution and the global legacy of the sewer.

We visit the mother of all sewers, the 2000 year old antique anus of the empire, the Roman Cloaca Maxima where it all began. To Banares, (also known as Varanasi), India’s oldest city, where Hindu celebrate their faith, bathing in the sacred waters of the polluted Ganges, downstream of the outfall of Varanasi’s sewers.

St. John’s Newfoundland, Canada, is one of many coastal communities dumping their raw sewage into open water. They now live with the effects of some two hundred years of dumping their sewage into St. John’s harbour. In St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada, scientist, Dr. Wayne Fairchild tells us of the gender bending results of mixing ‘treated’ sewage effluents and Atlantic Salmon.

Asks American civil engineer Laura Orlando, “Why should we gamble by putting toxic sewage waste on our agricultural land?” We continue to dump sewage sludges onto our agricultural lands across North America and Western Europe even though sewage sludges contain an unknown quantity of heavy metals and other toxins and chemicals. Through the studies of Swedish scientists and engineers, we review the long term toxifying effects on our agricultural lands from this practice and the ultimate implications for our food chain.

In looking at comments made about my film CRAPSHOOT, I have noticed most complaints are that there are no solutions offered, certainly no practical solutions.

Well in fact I do offer solutions in this film. Separation at source and a move away from using water, especially clean drinkable water, as a medium to move our wastes away. I made this film as a way to generate discussion, to alert us to what is happening all around us, but out of our immediate view.

So my own dear old dad, now passed away at 96 years old, who worked as a civil engineer his entire working life, always said to me, “People will not change their behavior until they have shit coming out of their own taps”.