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Do you know what all this is—the heaps of muck pile up on the streets during the night, the scavengers’ carts and the foetid flow of sludge that the pavement hides from you? It is the flowering meadow, green grass, marjoram, thyme and sage, the lowing of contented cattle in the evening, the scented hay and the golden wheat, the bread on your table and the warm blood in your veins—health and joy and life.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Aside from the signs we see in public spaces which remind us to clean up after our canines and the toilets in our bathrooms, there is little need for most urban dwellers to think about where their waste goes, thanks to a sophisticated largely invisible sewerage system and noisy disposal trucks that carry our rubbish away, somewhere where it becomes somebody else’s problem.
Not all of Australia, including some city areas, is so fortunate. In her book Plenty: Digressions on Food, Gay Bilson writes about the constant battle of dealing with kitchen and human waste at her former Sydney restaurant Berowra Waters. Cleaning grease traps and ungodly smells drifting from an antiquated and inadequate treatment system became part and parcel of the madness of running a restaurant situated at the bottom of a cliff on a river. The fact the restaurant was ever given a permit to operate under those circumstances points to a much broader problem—the disconnection between the various stages of the food cycle and our dysfunctional relationship with waste. It serves as a reminder of how little attention is paid to what comes after the consumption process, never mind the already problematic disconnection between production and consumption within industrial agriculture. Farmers markets, community supported agriculture and alternative models of food distribution have found innovative ways of connecting urban consumers to rural producers, but we continue to remain alienated from our waste. On the surface, this may seem like a good thing—safe, hygienic and inoffensive—but then again, maybe not…
Years ago, in another lifetime, it became my business to take an interest in wastewater. A part-time job as a wastewater officer at a local council opened my eyes to a world of shit to which I had never given a moment’s thought. I was introduced to septic tanks, greywater (kitchen and shower water) and blackwater (toilet waste). I was fascinated to learn that there are micro-organisms quite happy to dine on the excrement of others and do it with great efficiency. Who would have thought? I was shocked to find that there were significant patches in the Dandenongs Ranges outside Melbourne where the majority of households pump their untreated laundry and dishwater directly into roadside gullies, creeks and national parks. Most of these houses and their septic systems were constructed at a time when there was little appreciation for the damage that nutrient-rich wastewater can do to an ecology that has evolved in low nutrient conditions. Even for an amateur such as myself, the weed problems, tree dieback and decline in aquatic life were not difficult to spot. Local plumbers and concerned residents rang me regularly with horror stories of untreated effluent from cracked or overflowing septic tanks seeping in backyards and into the open gutters of the tourist townships which are nestled amongst the temperate rainforest. Segments of the community wanted to avoid the high-tech engineering solution of sewering the entire area, which was scheduled to take 25 years and predicted to cost up to $250 million. Some advocated small-scale, localised recycling solutions that could allow the water to be used for the horticultural industries in the region and that would do less damage to the sensitive environment in the process. They lost the struggle. Their ideas were seen as too radical; besides, according to the water authorities, food producers were not interested in paying more for recycled water. Nobody asked them whether they might feel differently if they were no longer able to extract water from the creeks, a situation which realised itself a few years later when drought conditions forced a reduction in water allocations (indeed, even more years later, they are now changing their tune).
The definition of waste is largely cultural and has changed significantly over time. What we regard as waste today—that is, sewerage—was once regarded with some value. Indeed, for millennia, and as recently as the last century, waste was a gastronomic resource, not just a sanitation liability. For the great cities of Europe such as London, Berlin, Vienna and Paris, the nineteenth century was a time in which, by necessity, much consideration was given to the struggle to feed the growing urban population and deal with its waste. As one of many proposed responses to the problem, French sanitation engineer A. Mille demonstrated with an experimental farm in Clichy in 1867 just how productive land irrigated with effluent could be. Not everyone embraced the idea of using effluent trickled through sandy soils to grow pasture for cows, but when the cows seem to prefer it unsewaged grass, it wasn’t so hard to convince local farmers of the merits of recycling effluent, which was used to wet the roots and never sprayed on the vegetables or leaves of the crops. The result in the first year of production was a six-fold increase in productivity and vegetables of such remarkable flavour and quality that they delighted the judges at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1867. Outside Berlin, similar experimental farms were developed, some of which are still in use today.
Even commercial food producers and backyard gardeners in Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and Perth used all manner of “waste” to grow vegetables during the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century. Blood and bones from the abattoirs, manures from animals which populated the city (often raised in people’s backyards) and “nightsoil” in unsewered areas were treated as a valuable fertiliser, and the gardening magazines of the time could not recommend them highly enough. Admittedly, none of these things were particularly pleasant from a visual or olfactory perspective, but from the point of view of food production, it was the smart thing to do. When manures and human excreta were not composted and used as fertiliser, they were dumped along waterways, an unsanitary practice that caused the city to be dubbed “Smellbourne” and resulted in several typhoid outbreaks which, in turn, lead to new health legislation and public health regulations. Eventually, an underground system was constructed in 1891 to transport sewage from homes and factories to a sewage treatment farm, a process that many would be surprised to find is still not complete.
Like the great cities of Europe, Melbourne embraced the modern sewerage system, the first step in transforming urban food systems from a circular cycle into a linear process of production, consumption and waste. It meant waste was suddenly out of sight and out of mind, at least to the extent that technology allowed. Some of Melbourne’s sewerage is still treated for horticultural use in the Werribee market gardens, though many producers are being increasingly forced out by development pressures or finding their soils depleted by the sodium which is not fully extracted from the treatment process. We put far harsher cleaning chemicals into our water than one hundred years ago, which makes it more difficult to enrich the soil without also doing some damage. As a result, it’s becoming harder and harder to grow food in Melbourne’s peri-urban fringe, and in the process, we are losing part of our agricultural heritage.
As environmentalists, irrigators and farming lobby groups duke it out over water allocations from the Murray-Darling Basin, much debate has ensued about how we need to continue extracting water from the river system in order to feed the nation. This is simply not correct. Much of what is produced from the Murray-Darling food basic is exported anyway. Instead, we should be thinking about closing the loop in our food production systems, finding ways to use waste and water more wisely so we can treat the river and the land with more respect. Our unwavering faith in the power of technology and human ingenuity to get us out of the messes we create for ourselves has created an artificial separation between both ends of the food chain over the last century and made us fearful of the most natural processes of life—the continuous cycles of destruction, decay and rejuvenation that have fed us, and all living things, since the beginning of time. If the experimental farms outside Paris could generate six times more produce than conventional farms, maybe we need to start thinking about this whole agricultural caper in Australia a little differently. Victor Hugo would no doubt approve.
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