Make It Clear: Why You Can't Just Flush and Forget
Every two weeks, we'll bring you new episodes of “Make It Clear” that cover timely and relevant topics in the water and wastewater industries. Our guests will also provide their unique insights as we discuss the world’s most precious resource.
While our content is mainly geared toward water and wastewater professionals, we welcome everyone who’d like to listen.
Make It Clear: Why You Can't Just Flush and Forget
A Brief History of Wastewater - Pt 1
In this episode, we journey through ancient civilizations to uncover how humanity first tackled wastewater and sanitation. From the advanced sewers of the Indus Valley to Rome’s engineering marvels, we explore brilliant innovations, surprising missteps, and how history’s sanitation lessons still shape the way we treat water today.
If you have comments or questions about our podcast, you can reach us through this link. To discuss a project or talk to one of our engineers, call 800-348-9843.
00:08
Hello and welcome to Make It Clear, a conversational podcast about all things related to water and wastewater. I'm your host, Angela Bounds, and I'm joined by my co-host, Shawn Rapp. In each episode, we'll tackle a relevant topic with facts and expert opinions and make things clear.
Angela: Hello and thank you for joining us again. So today, Shawn and I thought that it would be a good idea to go back
00:38
in history and really look at the roots of sanitation and septic systems. Or not just septic systems, but treatment of waste coming out of different places. Now, here's the deal. History is not my strongest subject. I would rather that you ask me to do calculus
01:07
than to ask me the year that something happened. I may be able to describe it. I may be able to talk about it. But history was definitely not my strongest subject. So today we're going to be relying heavily on Shawn. Shawn has… history is his jam.
Shawn: History and research.
Angela: and research. He knows the dates. He knows the places,
01:36
He knows how to pronounce them and is not going to butcher them the way that I would.
Shawn: Well, I hope I don't butcher them.
Angela: Hopefully not. But so we really just wanted to kind of take a look back in history and see like, when did we start treating wastewater? Like when did this really come about and look at through history how, how different civilizations and different people throughout history have
02:04
dealt with their wastewater.
Shawn: Yeah, I think that's probably a little more accurate as how they dealt with it. Treatment actually doesn't enter the picture until probably what, 150 years ago?
Angela: Yes, yes, a very long time, but they did have to do something with it. So let's start in a time far, far away. All right, Shawn. So we're going back about 4,000 years.
Shawn: Yeah, something like that. We're going all the way back to the Indus Valley.
02:32
Angela: Right.
Shawn: In what was, what is now Pakistan, sort of the India Pakistan area.
Angela: Yep.
Shawn: And there was a civilization, it was almost a city state called Mohenjo-Daro. And it was founded probably about 2500 BC.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: These folks were quite brilliant actually. And as we go through this, you're going to see that there are a lot of, a lot of things that happened very early on that were brilliant.
03:02
Then, as we march forward in time, we kind of lose some of that until...
Angela: And then come back around.
Shawn: And then come back around. It's absolutely amazing how that happened.
Angela: Isn't it interesting how you watch history repeat itself like that?
Shawn: Yeah.
Angela: We did figure this out way back when.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: But now we're doomed to repeat it because we didn't learn.
Shawn: Exactly. Yeah.
Angela: All right. So what were they doing in the Indus Valley?
Shawn: Well, Mohenjo-Daro was quite an interesting place. It was...
03:29
very advanced for the time. They had a city that was basically built on a grid system, much like we did back then, or Europe did, during the Middle Ages, before everything started getting overcrowded. uh When they had original intent. But no, they had houses that were built out of baked bricks. They had broad streets. And the one thing that was very interesting was that almost every home, without exception, had a bathroom.
03:58
Angela: Right, right.
Shawn: They had, it was separated out into a place where they would bathe, which wasn't necessarily like a bathtub, but it was more like a flat area that sloped toward one corner with a drain in it. And they, some of the houses actually had toilets that were built into the wall that sloped into the underground sewer, which they had sewer pipes.
Angela: Underground sewer, yeah.
Shawn: Yeah. It was very advanced for its time. And all the, all the
04:26
The sewage then would flow through these pipes into communal cesspits or cesspools that were located strategically within the city and some trying to get out of the city. But yeah, quite interesting.
Angela: They took sanitation seriously.
Shawn: They did. They took it very seriously. It was actually more of a religious thing for them than anything else.
Angela: Cleanliness.
Shawn: Yeah. They didn't really find, what's really interesting is as they were doing archaeology on Mohenjo-Daro and
04:56
There's a sister city, the name of Harappa, that was a little way away from where Mohenjo-Daro was. But as they were doing excavations and so on, they found that there was no real hierarchical structure. Like there was no royalty, they didn't find any palaces or anything like that.
Angela: ah
Shawn; What they did find was a very opulent bath house. And there's a few of them there. so the thought is that they
05:25
worshiped the idea of cleanliness above everything else. that's where we get all of this coming from is because that was their main aim. They put those things into everyday life.
Angela: Fun fact. I wanted to be an archeologist when I was in the fourth grade.
Shawn: You too?
Angela: I did. Oh, so fun. We did an exercise where we buried stuff. Like we created artifacts.
Shawn: Oh, that would be fun.
Angela: And somebody buried them and then we had to go out and unearth them.
05:56
So fun. I wanted to be an archeologist for years after that.
Shawn: Yes. I totally understand that.
Angela: Yes. I still get excited if you find a dinosaur bone. All right. So, but the town with, how did you pronounce that?
Shawn: Mohenjo-Daro?
Angela: Mohenjo-Daro was abandoned.
Shawn: It was, but not until after we find out about Knossos in Greece. So,
06:26
these things sort of overlap. according to the archeologists, they were saying that Mesopotamia and Mahenjo-Daro would be in trade, because they found items from both those places in the opposite cities. So, Mahenjo-Daro traded with Mesopotamia, Mesopotamia traded with Mahenjo-Daro. But Greece is somewhere along the way. And so, there is a lot of speculation that they would have been trading with Greece as well.
06:54
Angela: Okay.
Shawn: And so we find the city of Knossos, which was almost a city within a city.
Angela: Okay.
Shawn: They had a very opulent palace for their royalty.
Angela: Okay.
Shawn: And inside they actually had sewage, not sewage. Well, of course they had sewage.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: But they had a sanitary system.
Anela: Right.
Shawn: Where they had toilets with flowing water that would actually flush.
Angela: Okay. And this is around 2000 BC.
Shawn: This is around 2000 BC. Yes. So there's a little bit of overlap in there. But…
07:24
Yeah, it was quite advanced for its time as well. The thought is that maybe some of those things that came from Mahenjo-Daro are also…
Angela: They brought them over to Greece.
Shawn: Yeah. I don't know that for sure, but there's sort of speculation. And so they had bathtubs in Knossos that were connected to an underground sewer system, just like they would have had in Mahenjo-Daro. They also had channels and sewer pipes in the street that
07:54
were covered by a clay topping so that they could actually be maintained. So you could take a piece of that off there and clear blockages and all kinds of things. And then as the city or as the area grew bigger and they got more people, you need a bigger pipe. You build up the little trench that it's in and build up the clay on the outside of it. But again, we're talking about a Minoan civilization here. for them, it was also spiritual.
08:24
Just like it was in Mahenjo-daro. But they had public bathhouses, they had public latrines, which we'll get to in a little bit with another civilization. They had fountains and aqueducts. So the whole idea was that they would bring water in and that would flow through, carry the waste away. It would end up in the river.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: Because…
Angela: That's where it goes.
Shawn: That's where it goes, right? It just goes away. You don't see it anymore. It goes away.
08:53
The problem is, just like other ancient civilizations, you get your water out of the river…
Angela: Yeah, you drink out of there.
Shawn: You're washing water and so on out of there. So the river and any water body is essential for life. So they need that, but they're also dumping their waste into it. So that becomes a problem.
Angela: It usually does.
Shawn: Yes.
Angela: So you also...
09:22
You talk a little bit in the notes about Hippocrates.
Shawn: Yeah, there's a little bit about him and how he believed that health came from balance. So cleanliness, clean air, clean body…
Angela: Clean mind.
Shawn: Clean mind. Yeah. then having that, you would then have good health.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: So, which he's not wrong, but it didn't quite go far enough.
Angela: It didn't translate enough.
Shawn: Yeah, because they didn't know at the time enough about what caused...
09:52
illnesses. They just knew that, you know, there was bad air, bad dirt, all that stuff…
Angela: Right.
Shawn: could cause illness.
Angela: Yeah. But how exactly do we stop that?
Shawn: Exactly.
Angela: All right. And then we get to Rome.
Shawn: Rome's a story all into itself. We could probably spend an entire episode talking about Rome.
Angela: Yes.
Shawn: Rome was a marvel.
Angela: Yes.
Shawn: And although they also took a lot of things from the Greeks.
10:22
because they also had public toilets and they had public bath houses and sewer systems and aqueducts to bring the water in and take the water away.
Angela: Yes.
Shawn: And public fountains and all of that. So they had a lot of that, the same types of things, only they were a little more advanced.
Angela: They would sometimes run it 50 miles.
Shawn: They would, yes. And we're talking about millions of gallons of water a day.
Angela: Right.
Shawn: So you're taking water from other places
10:51
in an aqueduct.
Angela: Not insignificant.
Shawn: Not insignificant. The great accomplishment in Rome wasn't necessarily the way they were bringing the water in, but it was the way they were taking the water out.
Angela: Okay.
Shawn: They built something called the Coloca Maxima.
Angela: Okay.
Shawn: And I'm probably not pronouncing that right because I don't know Latin and I apologize.
Angela: Well, it's probably way better than I would have pronounced it.
Shawn: But it was originally built around the sixth century BC.
11:19
And it started out as a small series of pipes or small channels that would carry the water from the city into the Tiber river. Eventually, because the city grew and grew and grew, the disposal system also grew and grew and grew until it became a very large diameter series of what we would call pipes, quote unquote, but a large channel that would carry all that water away.
11:49
Again, we're talking about millions of gallons a day. So you can imagine just how large that would have been, which it is still there. You can go and see it.
Angela: I was actually going to say there are some places in Greece and some of the other places that we're talking about where you can still see the infrastructure.
Shawn: Oh yes.
Angela: Right. You can still see the channels and the infrastructure that was built back then.
12:18
Shawn: But with all those people, you know, had to have a way to get rid of all that stuff. Otherwise you have filth in the streets and all of that.
Angela: So, public bath houses.
Shawn: Yes, called thermae.
Angela: Oh man.
Shawn: They were social hubs. It was where you did business and you talked to your neighbors and so on.
Angela: Uh huh.
Shawn: We'll get to all of that in a minute.
Angela: I am a bit of a germaphobe and a little... I like things clean.
12:45
Shawn: One of the things that they borrowed from the Greeks, which a lot of people kind of take exception to were the public toilets or the public latrines. And here's the deal with those. There was no division. There was just a long row of seats and you could be sitting next to anybody and they were really close.
Angela: They're just right there.
Shawn: So, I mean, not at all like what we would
13:14
Think of today. It would be a little offensive to some people, I'm quite sure.
Angela: Yes, yeah.
Shawn: But...
Angela: Oh my gosh.
Shawn: The whole idea was that they were promoting public health.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: And it was a matter of pride for them that they had this wonderful thing.
Angela: Well, and they bathed every day.
Shawn: Just about
Angela: Just about, yeah.
Shawn: Yeah. The engineering in Rome was amazing and outstanding.
13:40
the whole idea of these things and how they improved on the designs from Greece and so on. It's just absolutely fantastic. That stuff still stands today.
Angela: So while it was advanced for the time, and we talk a lot about the advancement and how the technology was great for the time, there was a bit of a dark...
14:07
Shawn: Yeah, this is where things start to go downhill.
Angela: Yeah, a dark side to it.
Shawn: Yeah. And I would imagine this kind of thing actually was prevalent or in use before Rome. It's just that we get the record from Rome.
Angela: From Rome. They recorded it.
Shawn: Yeah, it's yeah. So because it had to have happened in other places. It had to have because there's no other really other way to deal with this stuff back then...
Angela: Yes.
Shawn: because they didn't know.
14:35
Angela: Disease spread in other places as well.
Shawn: Yes.
Angela: We just talk about it in terms of Rome because that is the information that we now have.
Shawn: Exactly. Yeah. So starting with the baths…
Angela: Yeah. Um…
Shawn: It's a great idea.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: But what happens…
Angela:Was there chlorine?
Shawn: I know that's, yeah, but you know, what happens when, you know, three or four hundred people use the same bath water every day for
15:01
three or four days… or five days and…
Angela: No
Shawn: they didn't change the water that often according to the records that are available. so when you have the same bath water, if you've got people that are sick in that bath water, that just kind of carries over to whoever happens to be in the bath water.
Angela: Yes. You have an open wound...
Shawn: Oh yeah.
Angela: You have a, you yourself are like the, you know, if you're on day four,
15:31
and you climb in with an open wound or you, I don't even know if I can say it. If you wash your hair in day four bath water.
Shawn: Yeah. Not sure how often that happened, but just the idea.
Angela: You know, if you're getting yourself wet to clean yourself and it gets into your eye or into an open wound.
Shawn: Even then if you had skin diseases or something like that, that could carry.
15:59
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: Water is just a vehicle for that. So, and if it's not being cleaned out regularly or flushed through regularly, then it just stays there. It's kinda like a soup.
Angela: Like a soup. It is bacteria soup.
Shawn: Yes, it is.
Angela: Oh man.
Shawn: And then there's the whole idea of latrines. Great idea.
Angela: Great idea.
Shawn: In theory.
Angela: Great idea. Great technology for the time.
Shawn: Yeah.
16:27
Angela: Now we look back at it and go, oh my goodness.
Shawn: Yes, because how did they clean themselves?
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: There was something called a Tresoria.
Angela: Okay.
Shawn: It's a sponge on a stick.
Angela: Uh-huh.
Shawn: And not everybody had their own, so which means that there were communal ones.
Angela: Communal sponges to clean yourself with?
Shawn: yup. The whole idea was that you would clean yourself and then you would...
16:55
dip it in water or in vinegar to clean it for the next person, which is not very sanitary.
Angela: Not very sanitary.
Shawn: Especially if you're using the same water to clean it in that the guy before you used.
Angela: But I'm sure to them that was sanitary. Right?
Shawn: Well, yeah, because they didn't have any idea of microbiology or waterborne diseases, anything like that. So, yeah, they honestly didn't know better. They just knew that people got sick. And then of course there's the Tiber River
17:24
where all the waste flowed. It's also the same place that people got their drinking water and water to cook in and water to wash their clothes in.
Angela: Yeah. All of the things.
Shawn: So, you know, it's not necessarily a great idea to be putting your waste into the same source where you're getting your drinking water.
Angela: Right.
Shawn: And even in the countryside, the farmers would spread human waste over the crops.
Angela: Yeah, as fertilizer.
Shawn: Yeah.
17:55
we know now is not a great idea, but back then they didn't think anything of it. yeah, I mean, this stuff sounds great until you look at the dark side. Great cities, great engineering, just didn't take it quite far enough.
Angela: Right. So then we move into medieval London.
Shawn: London is a really good case study for sanitation because it has a very long history.
18:25
It's a very old city. And so there is an awful lot of information about it. so one thing we do know about London is the river Thames runs through it, which was their source of drinking water, as well as cleaning water and everything else, just like the Tiber River was for Rome. And so we're getting now into about the 12th to the 14th century. And we're talking here about this used to be actually a kind of a small
18:54
town, but people started moving to London from the countryside. And a lot of it had to do with things that were happening in the countryside and whatnot. people are moving to London. Land is not necessarily, I wouldn't say scarce, they're building houses almost on top of each other. So you've got a lot of people living cheek by jowl in narrow houses that are right up against each other. So you've got a lot of people in very concentrated areas.
Angela: Yes.
19:23
Shawn: And like everybody before them, the waste ran through gutters and whatnot. It would be washed away by the rain. Chamber pots were a big thing back then.
Angela: Right.
Shawn: Not allowed to dump it during the day though. You had to dump it at night. And you know, all that water had to go somewhere and it ended up usually in the Thames. And it wasn't just waste like human waste. It was also things like
19:53
all of the trades that did business in London, the tanners, the butchers, all of the doctors that used chemicals and whatnot. Anybody who had any kind of… the tanners that used the chemicals like lye and stuff like that tanning. So all that stuff just washed into the river. And then it didn't have a central sewer system like Rome did. So again, we're kind of going backwards.
20:23
Which had always surprised me that things just kind of went backwards.
Angela: does it surprise you?
Shawn: Kind of, but…
Angela: it shouldn't.
Shawn: I know.
Angela: You've seen it.
Shawn: I know. But a lot of homes, especially if there was actually any property to speak of that the home sat on may have a cesspit or a privy, which, you know, to them was much better living than…
Angela: Right.
Shawn: a Chamber pot. But those cesspits filled up and they had to have somebody to get
20:53
to clean them out. There were terms for them, the night soil man was one of them, gong farmers is another one.
Angela: Interesting.
Shawn: Very interesting, yeah. But they were medieval waste collectors and they were often paid to shovel out cesspits by hand, which I can't imagine that being a very interesting job or fulfilling job, but no. But they would haul it out, they would come in at night and dig the cesspit out, clean it out,
21:23
haul the stuff outside the city and dump it or sell it to the farmers as fertilizer. It kept the city livable, habitable, because then you don't have stuff running through the streets necessarily.
Angela: And we are talking about like 12th to 14th century London.
Shawn: Outside the city in the countryside, things were better because you didn't have people living so close together. Of course, the air probably smelled a lot better.
Angela: I bet.
21:53
We all know. We all know that smell.
Shawn: Exactly. Although most of the smaller villages had communal latrines or they would just set up something in a field or have an open pit.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: And then they would take that and spread it on the crops, just like the guys bringing the stuff from the city. They would also do the same thing. They would spread it on their crops. It was kind of a mix of practical necessity and trial and error. So, again, it was because they didn't understand
22:23
microbiology because it wasn't anything, it wasn't a thing.
Angela: It wasn't until I was looking it up. wasn't until the 20th century that one of our common, one of our most commonly used constituents for testing wastewater, BOD5 was discovered. The test for BOD5 was discovered in the 20th, not until the 20th century. So we're talking, you know,
22:53
600 years…
Shawn: Something like that.
Angela: I mean, before this, right. it was discovered in London.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: The test was it as the story goes, it took five days, five days for the wastewater to get from one city to another down the Thames river. And that's why it's BOD five because it's five days of travel time between those two. So you can see what the
23:22
Reduction in BOD5 is.
Shawn: Interesting. You can imagine that all of this kind of created some public health problems.
Angela: See? Math for me.
Shawn: Exactly. Because the city was so crowded and so on, there was sort of an ideal condition for diseases. I mean, that's sort of what happened.
Angela: That happened a lot.
Shawn: It did. And the Black Plague in the 14th century was kind of a testament to that.
23:51
Because you had so many people living close together, you also had a problem with rats and fleas. So they carried that. And that's why, you know, a huge portion of the city ended up dying because of, of black death. because of that, they started passing some basic sanitation laws. They required the streets to be cleaned, waste pits to be moved further from homes. And then the interesting part was if you
24:21
compared the rest of the city to monasteries and convents, huge difference.
Angela: Interesting.
Shawn: Yeah, they were a rare exception because they had latrines that connected to running water. And so they would have running water coming through, carrying away the waste.
Angela: Oh, okay.
Shawn: We ended up with a much healthier environment.
Angela: Yeah, because it actually carried away the waste.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: That's not to say something didn't happen to the folks who were on the other end of where that emptied out.
Angela: Of course.
24:47
Shawn: But the monasteries and convents actually were much cleaner places. Then… so they also tended to be the places that tended to the sick. They were a healthier environment. And benevolent orders. But yeah, for a lot of the people in London, disease and dirt was just a way of life. And you didn't necessarily have people bathing as often. mean, they'd still bathe, but not quite as often, more often than
25:16
folks in the old west, which is surprising, but not surprising.
Angela: Yeah, not surprising.
Shawn: But no, they actually thought that cleanliness was a good thing, even though there was a lot of filth and dirt. But they did have city ordinances that tried to help control with waste disposal. And so they implemented some new stone conduits or what they consider to be new stone conduits to help bring cleaner water into London.
25:46
But for the most part, again, because they didn't understand what caused it, that was sort of where they ended up.
Angela: Yeah. There were probably a number of causes. And I'm sure with the lack of, like you've referenced, microbiology, education, and understanding at that point, it made it very, very difficult to pinpoint.
Shawn; Yes.
26:13
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: And we'll actually talk about that in the next episode.
Angela: The next episode. So as Shawn was doing this research and bringing the information in, we decided that it would be best to run this in two different podcasts.
Shawn: It's just fascinating stuff.
Angela: It is. And there's so much information...
Shawn: There really is.
Angela: that we think is really important for everybody to know.
Shawn: Or at least fun.
Angela: Yeah, fun. And well, I think that we'll
26:42
we see a theme already coming out that you have to learn and know what has happened in the past so that you don't repeat it. Right? And even now, there are some questions about whether, well, do we really need that level of sanitation? Do we really need, does that really matter? And somebody has already proven that it does. So.
27:10
I think that wraps up this episode and we will be back in two weeks with episode two that'll have from about the mid 1800s through present day.
Shawn: So yeah, looking forward to that.
Angela: So thank you, Shawn, for the wealth of knowledge you provide and thank you all for listening.
We want to thank you again for joining us today.
27:40
Before you go, don't forget to subscribe where you listen to podcasts so you're notified when new episodes are posted. Also, you can leave your comments or suggestions through the contact link on our website, www.orenco.com. Until next time, have a great day.
