I’ve had the same question. I wonder if it’s just volume, or if human waste is easier for the bacteria to attack?
It’s both volume and the fact that feces is more broken down than a ground-up grapefruit rind.
Also, human feces is itself composed of a significant fraction of bacterial biomass: some 25–54% of the solids, in fact.
(This is why it is unnecessary to add bacteria and enzymes to septic tanks using additives like Rid-X. Plenty of bacteria goes into the septic tank every time someone uses the toilet.)
You size it big enough to handle the expected inflow. If it’s too small, it won’t process the waste fast enough.
IANA expert, but consider that there’s really two waste streams conceptually. One is water and the other is everything else. The water can flow right through the system. It’s the everything else we need to consider.
Now think of a compost heap. Grass or yard waste goes on top, and over a time of weeks or months crumbly compost is created by bio-magic. Now imagine a very soggy version of a compost heap. It’s a lot more alive and converts organic inputs to outputs much more rapidly.
A couple hundred gallons is a lot of waste once you mentally subtract out a bunch of the water & just consider the “active ingredients”.
This is why I asked about grey water. maybe I’m wasteful, but I looked at my water bill and I seem to use about 88 gallons a day of water. (I measured once, and it takes a gallon or so before I get hot water in the kitchen.) I suppose the other extreme is the Fokkers in the Florida Keys (“If it’s yellow, let it mellow…”) I don’t know how much I use when I water the lawn (I suppose I could dig into past bills and check). I’m thinking it takes a lot of area or soil type or dry climate to soak up 88 gallons a day.
We have well water, so our water is “free”, but I would never use it to water our lawn or wash a car. We use rain barrel water to water plants. There are three barrels (two at our house, one at the barn) that fill up anytime we get rain.
My town is not as small or rural as others are talking about (a suburb of 12k in the Akron/Cleveland area) but we get our water from Cleveland Water and our sewage treatment from the county, which also works in conjunction with the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (who also manages stormwater). Northeast Ohio is pretty dense with population broken up in to many cities, villages and townships so it makes the most sense to manage it all as one large block and not have a bunch of individual systems.
88 gallons is not quite 12 cubic feet. If you have a half-acre lot that’s not quite 22,000 square feet. Doing the math …
So you’re talking about dropping about 6 thousandths of an inch of water across the entire surface per day. That’s the definition of a pretty severe drought: 2-3/8" of water per year.
To be sure, your leach field is not the full size of your yard, but it’s simply part of the expanding anti-funnel that leads from your 1" diameter sink drain to the entirety of your land. As long as your land can absorb your water and your neighbor’s land can absorb their water there’s no accumulating net overage.
This result also hints at why “perc tests” and minimum lot sizes are a thing when septic leach fields are involved. Parcels 1/10th that size whose soil was nearly as hard & impervious as concrete might well have a problem disposing of ten times that depth of water per year.
The closest town to me (about 500 people) decided to put in a water/sewage system. No more out houses.
Well, that did not go over well with one resident. He killed the former mayor, stole an end loader and attacked the water treatment plant with it flooding the main street in town with water which turned it into a skating rink.
I’m on a septic system and about 5 miles away.
Ahh, political activism.
.45 activism.
It really is a nice little town (now).
Does it have a name that might ironically evoke the idea of a lot of tidybowl?
Uh, I don’t think so. It’s Alma Colorado.
What are you thinking of?
I found a story in an archive of the Spokane paper which matched what you related, and they referred to the town but never actually named it. From the description (“near Breckenridge”), it sounded like it could have been Blue River.
Good guess.
When I was in Havana, the lady hanging out near the bathroom offered a very different service for 1 dollar.
One thing that shows up in my apartment complex’s newsletter is “proper garbage disposal use.” Do not pour large amounts of grease down the sink (the amount that washes off your dishes is something it can handle), and don’t put any kind of raw potato in it either, because it will basically turn into wallpaper paste when run through those blades.
I keep a can in my freezer for any “extra” fat, and store meat bones in a bag, also in the freezer, and discard them in my household garbage when it gets full.
“Flushable” wipes are that way only because they aren’t big enough to plug a standard toilet pipe. They do not dissolve the way TP does.
Citrus rinds don’t biodegrade the way other fruit peels do.
When I was in the Girl Scouts, we burned some of our trash and buried other things, but rinds were something we always packed out, or put in standard household trash, for this reason.
Does that include potato peels (skin)? (asking for a friend)
Nope, no potato peels either. Maybe if one slips in, it’s not going to hurt anything, but not anything more than that.
I do know that many people sometimes grind up a lemon or orange rind to freshen their disposal unit. That’s not the same as a dozen grapefruit rinds.
My own disposal unit doesn’t work. I don’t use those things anyway.