Wastewater is just a compound of numerous valuable stuff, which contains energy and resources. In the future, the social value of wastewater might be changed if every single family were able to make use of wastewater, in other words, people may regard wastewater as valuable rather than waste. To achieve this goal, people’s value about wastewater should be changed and it needs special regulatory framework and advanced technology.
Decentralization of regulation to communities as small as possible will lead to the best result of addressing wastewater issue. From my personal point of view and experience, the best regulatory framework of something is that decentralize the regulatory responsibility to every single person then everyone is responsible for it, which in other words, everyone believe his benefit or life is closely related to that thing then every individual will take the responsibility of regulating that thing well spontaneously. This is the cheapest and most effective way to solve a problem thoroughly and it will not have potential risks along with this solution, however, it is also the most difficult way because it needs to change people’s value of something, and we all know that people’s value is not a thing that can be changed easily in a short period of time.
My personal experience is that when I was a kid, I lived in a remote rural area in China. And in that time, most of people there made a living by farming and there was no wastewater infrastructure there in the village, but the rivers and lakes nearby were in pristine condition. One very important reason of this was the regulation of wastewater was decentralized to every single family instead of regulating the wastewater by a unit of community or city like in the urban areas. How come? The condition was that everyone in the village thought that domestic wastewater was valuable. Every family in the village had a toilet in the backyard outside the house, and it was used to reserve toilet wastes and leftover wastewater. After a period of time, fermentation of the wastewater will produce very good fertilizer for growing the crops. Due to this reason, everyone in the village treasured domestic wastewater and no one would like to discharge it into the rivers and lakes, it was all reserved in the toilet. What’s more, occasionally there were some people roaming between villages with a cart drawn by a mule to collect poos, because it was a great fertilizer for their crops and vegetables. And the wastewater was regulated perfectly well and no one or community was worried about the domestic wastewater would pollute the environment, because all the people had the value that wastewater was valuable and they were going to make use of it instead of waste it.
I know that the condition is very much different and difficult in the cities compared with in some specific rural areas, but this phenomenon at least indicates that there might be a perfect way to regulate wastewater without massive money cost and complicated policy legislations. The only thing we need to do is to change people’s value of wastewater, to make people realize that the wastewater is valuable and it can be even traded for money. If one day, everyone has a strong sense of ownership of the wastewater he or she produced, there might be no wastewater issue about polluting the field and the oceans. To achieve this goal, I think the first difficulty we face is that let every family has the ability to make use of their domestic wastewater. And technology might be a method to address this issue: there could be some kind of device which can convert the wastewater to purified water and fertilizer. The purified water can be reused by the family while the fertilizer could be use for fertilizing vegetables if they got a vegetable patch in the backyard or simply sell it to the farmers. By this way, a lot of water is saved, byproduct of wastewater can be traded for something useful or money, and the possibility of wastewater pollution is eradicated.
In conclusion, in the future wastewater could be valuable rather than waste and decentralize the regulatory obligation is a practical way to regulate wastewater well and the ultimate condition of this is to make every single individual be responsible for the wastewater they produced. And to achieve this goal, people’s value of wastewater should be changed. And new advanced technology is a possible way to make people realize wastewater is valuable which will increase people’s sense of ownership of their wastewater.
by Jianfeng Tian
wastewater thinking 