“It need hardly be stated that the removal of human excrements out of cities and towns has always been a question of the highest importance, both from considerations of public health and national economy.”
Nineteenth century engineer Frederick Krepp had a lot to say about sewage. In 1867, when he published The Sewage Question (Longmans, Green and Co press), cities around the world were desperate for a solution to their poopy problems. Krepp had a solution for them — the pneumatic air toilet. Though his preferred design didn’t replace the flush toilet, he left a fascinating book detailing the 19th century’s wild explorations with sewage, with lessons ripe for our modern day problems.
The mid-1800s were the heyday of sewage solutions. At this time, flush toilets were newly popular, but there weren’t systems to manage the wastewater. So sewage overflowed in towns, poisoning the water, killing fish, spreading disease and causing smells so awful they shut down Parliament.
City government and private industry looked for solutions. They experimented, tinkered, invested huge amounts of money, and threw up their hands. Most of the book’s 200 pages seeks to answer the question at the front of everyone’s mind: “What is the cheapest and most efficient technical process for rendering human excreta useful instead of dangerous?”
Krepp discusses the social and economic impacts of poorly managed sewage and lessons from failed nations who neglected agriculture. To Krepp, sewage and agriculture were intrinsically linked: people ate food from the land and excreted nutrients, which should be returned to the land.
Next, he complains about water flush toilets and the high cost for town sewers. His critiques echo the same problems we face today in attempts to bring safe sanitation to the 40 percent of the world that lacks it.
The bulk of the book covers all the sewer schemes of the day — and there were many! Including air closets, earth closets, buckets and pneumatic carts.
Here are five take-away lessons from The Sewage Question:
1. Sewage has value. In the 1800s, the majority of people believed sewage had value; they understood nutrients had to be replaced from farmlands to have productive crops. The problem was how to get the nutrients back out once water was used to transport feces. Writes Krepp: “We have seen how bountiful the reward, if we obey the divine Laws of Nature, by applying to agriculture the most valuable mineral and organic substances daily ejected from our bodies and how severe the punishment if we neglect to do so..[and allow them to pollute]”
2. Proper treatment of feces is necessary for a healthy society. On page two, Krepp lays out his view of governments: they exist to secure life, liberty and happiness for people, which relies on public health. Healthy people, he points out, need abundant food, clean air and an unlimited supply of clean water. Feces must be properly managed to meet these needs. “All efforts at sound civil government must fail, unless they secure these primary conditions of human happiness,” he writes.
3. The economy is tied to nature’s laws. Krepp calls this the sublime laws of nature and cautions that neglect of these laws leads to national decay. He emphasizes nutrient cycling and the need to “return to the soil the minimal ingredients we take from it.”
4. It’s harder to remove nutrients from wastewater than to keep urine and feces separated from the start. Many of the schemes outlined in The Sewage Question attempt to turn wastewater into a dry fertilizer, with dismal results. They proved, in myriad ways, it’s harder to remove nutrients from liquid wastewater than it is to compost humanure manure from dry toilets.
One epic failure took place in Birmingham, a riverside town of 300,000 people. They created filter beds with gravel and sand, in attempts to remove poop from wastewater. But the filter beds became choked and useless and the sludge wouldn’t dry and so no one wanted it for their farms.
5. Sanitation systems must manage excreta from the toilet all the way until it’s returned to the earth. Krepp’s preference was the pneumatic toilet invented by Charles Lierner, whom Krepp had a business relationship with. This system managed feces from the house, to tanks, to transport, to special farming tools that delivered it into the earth. He also spoke favorably about the dry toilet options, such as the earth closet system of Rev. Henry Moule.
You can read a free digital copy of The Sewage Question or purchase a reprint from Forgotten Books.
May our labour not prove in vain, but assist in opening and smoothing the road to new fields of honourable and useful enterprise!
-Frederick Krepp, May 22, 1877
