A ‘DIRTY SECRET’
Climate change raises the risk from failing sewage systems
LOWNDES COUNTY, Ala. — To Catherine Coleman Flowers, this is “holy ground”: the place where her ancestors were enslaved and her parents fought for civil rights and she came of age. Here, amid the rich, dark earth and emerald farm fields, she is home.
Yet this ground also harbors a threat, one that will worsen as the planet warms.
For decades, the people of this rural county 30 miles south of Montgomery have struggled with waste. Municipal sewage systems do not extend to this farming community, and many residents cannot afford septic systems; their waste flows directly into ditches or streams. Even those with septic tanks find that they often fail in the dense, waterlogged soil. On rainy days, toilets won’t flush and foul effluent burbles up into bathtubs and sinks.
The untreated waste and warm, wet weather breed illnesses rarely seen in developed nations. Visitors to the county – doctors, politicians, a United Nations human rights expert – have expressed shock that such conditions exist in the 21st century in the world’s richest country.
This is America’s “dirty secret,” Flowers said.
The problems stretch beyond one county in central Alabama. Dwindling investment in infrastructure, chronic neglect of rural and minority communities, and the ravages of climate change mean that an estimated half-million U.S. households lack adequate sanitation. In Black Belt Alabama, on the flooded coasts of Florida, in thawing Alaska towns, waste is no longer something that can be forgotten as soon as it is flushed away.
The world needs a different paradigm, Flowers said, one that doesn’t bury waste but transforms it.
Flowers, who was named a MacArthur “genius” in October, is working on a new kind of septic system. Instead of flushing waste, the system she envisions filters, cleans and recycles it. Instead of sending raw sewage into the soil, it turns it into water for use in washing machines, and into nutrients for fertilizer, and perhaps even energy for homes.
With scientists, engineers and people from communities like Lowndes County, Flowers this month launched the Wastewater Innovation and Environmental Justice Lab at Columbia University. It will serve as a hub for research on sanitation policy, an incubator for rural activism, and – advocates hope – a birthplace for a better, greener way of managing waste.
What was once a problem can become a solution, Flowers said. And the change will start in Lowndes County, as it has before.
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Her parents’ activism connected Flowers to the world beyond Lowndes County. As a teenager, she joined the Alabama Students for Civil Rights and spent a summer in D.C. as a youth fellow at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation. She read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” wrote politics-infused poetry and dreamed of becoming the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 11th grade, frustrated with subpar conditions at her high school, Flowers wrote an exposé for a local newsletter. That led to the formation of a community group, then a lawsuit and, ultimately, to the resignation of the principal and school board superintendent.
“My father’s famous thing he would always say was, ‘Catherine, if you take one step, God will take two,’” Flowers said. It meant that change was possible, but you had to do the work.
Flowers studied history and political science in college between leading marches and attending protests over wrongful convictions and to promote affirmative action. She served in the U.S. Air Force, worked at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta, and taught current events and civil rights law to high school students in D.C., North Carolina and Detroit.
But while Flowers was on a visit in 2000, an old friend pulled her into a hug and urged her to come home. “Things are worse for us than they ever have been,” Flowers recalled her friend saying. So Flowers moved to nearby Montgomery and took a job with the NAACP.
That’s when she found out that Lowndes County’s soil was part of the problem.
The dark and fertile clay – so ideal for cotton farming, and the source of the region’s nickname, “Black Belt” – is terrible for drainage. It swells up when wet, closing off air pockets and creating a watertight seal.
But septic systems require permeable soil. Waste from homes is piped into a buried tank, where solid material is retained but liquid waste is released into an underground “leach field,” where it is slowly broken down by microbes as it percolates through the earth.
All over the county, septic systems were breaking down. Heavy rainfall would seal up the soil until effluent had nowhere to go but up onto lawns or back into homes.
U.S. Department of Agriculture surveys show that more than 93% of land in the county is of “very limited” suitability for septic tank leach fields. An engineer could design a special system to work in those conditions, but that would cost upward of $10,000 per household – more than half the median annual income for Lowndes residents.
Flowers recalled the first time she met Pamela Rush, a warm, soft-spoken mother of two whose single-wide trailer had no waste treatment system at all – just a yellow “straight pipe” that carried waste into a pit behind her home. Inside, the home was furnished with care; art on the walls, a mobile that read “Angels live here” hung overhead. But the sour smell of sewage permeated everything.
Rush’s preteen daughter suffered from asthma and had to sleep with a continuous positive airway pressure, commonly known as CPAP, machine. Her teenage son was struggling in school. And Rush had diabetes and respiratory problems and could not work. She worried constantly about the health effects of the sewage pooling just outside her walls.
Yet there was no money for even a conventional septic tank, let alone an engineered system. The family was still paying off the mortgage on a mobile home that was sold to them for far more than it was worth.
“I just cried,” Flowers said. “It was so stark.”
When a visit to another resident’s flooded lawn gave Flowers a rash her doctors couldn’t diagnose, she turned to scientists at Baylor College’s National School of Tropical Medicine. The researchers collected stool samples from 55 residents and found that 24 contained traces of hookworm or another intestinal parasite. These infections, which can cause inflammation and nutrient deficiencies as well as developmental delays in children, were supposed to have been eradicated in the South almost 100 years ago.
Flowers – then director of the nonprofit Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise (ACRE) – set out to determine the scale of the problem. With a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, she and local volunteers surveyed roughly half of all households in the county. About two-thirds relied on septic tanks, and about 10% of homes had no waste treatment system at all. More than 500 respondents described trouble with their systems, even those who were connected to municipal sewers or had septic tanks that were permitted by the state. Flowers’ mother had sewage backing up into her sink.
Sandy Oliver, a volunteer who had worked on the survey, struggled with her own septic tank. Rainy weather or running the washing machine would turn the backyard into sludge. The tank constantly needed pumping – a $500 fee she could not afford.
“It’s not like we can help it,” Oliver said. “It’s not the systems. It’s the ground.”
To the state of Alabama, that circumstance was a crime. Between 1996 and 2002, court records show, 14 Lowndes County residents were arrested and charged with using an “insanitary” septic system or were charged with a related violation. In half of the cases, the charges eventually were dismissed. But six people pleaded guilty and were required to pay a fine of $250 plus court costs.
The arrests largely stopped after media attention in the mid-2000s. The law is still on the books but, Sherry Bradley, the director of the Bureau of Environmental Services at the Alabama Department of Public Health, said in an interview that she doesn’t want to penalize people for something she knows they have no power to change.
Flowers has a vision for a better septic system. It’s cheap to buy and easy to run. It’s equipped with sensors that can monitor for signs of pathogens, including the coronavirus. Instead of allowing sewage to seep into the ground, the system separates waste into its component parts, which can then be recycled.
“Waste could provide a lot of solutions,” Flowers said, “if we just learned to think about it differently.”
In Kartik Chandran, she found a partner who shares that vision.
They met five years ago at a conference on wastewater issues. Chandran, an environmental engineer at Columbia University, recalled being struck by how similar Lowndes County’s waste problems were to those in his native India. Flowers remembered hearing about Chandran’s research and thinking, “This is the technological solution we need.”
An expert in the chemical and biological processes that remove contaminants from waste, Chandran had helped to improve sewage systems from D.C. to Denmark. But he knew those advances weren’t helping the millions of people who live beyond the reach of pipes.
He also thought it was a mistake to refer to sewage as “waste,” when it is actually rich with potentially valuable resources: nitrogen, phosphorous, organic material. He and his colleagues started working on ways to scale down big-city sewage technology and upgrade treatment processes, turning every septic tank into its own miniature “resource recovery system.”
Chandran’s lab is a maze of plastic tubes and burbling tanks, each jug containing some mix of wastewater and chemicals. In one prototype, a film of bacteria takes the nitrogen out of synthetic urine; it’s been running for more than a decade, he said, and takes almost no energy to function. With another experiment, Chandran is trying to find the right combination of microbes that will turn organics from fecal sludge into fuel, which could theoretically be used to help power homes. When all these processes are integrated, he said, the heat and acidity produced through decomposition will kill off dangerous germs, and the water that comes out the other end will be clean enough to be recycled in washing machines or cooling systems.
Through the Wastewater Innovation and Environmental Justice lab, which is being launched this month, representatives from Lowndes County, Navajo Nation and other affected areas will be part of the design team for the high-tech septic tank. The lab has already gotten funding from a sustainable finance company, and Chandran is working on applying for more grants. Once the coronavirus pandemic recedes, engineers from his lab will move into partner communities while they work on improving the system. The project has received initial funding from a sustainable finance company.
Different places will have different needs, Chandran noted. Rural communities like Lowndes County might benefit from a tank that extracts nitrogen and phosphorous to be used as fertilizer. In the desert Southwest, it might be more important to purify to drinking quality the water that comes out of the tanks.
“We’re not trying to force a technology,” he said. “We’re working with a community to find out what needs to be done.”
The technology could be useful beyond rural areas; even urban sewage systems are at risk as the planet warms. Heavy rains cause overflows that send billions of gallons of effluent into local waterways. Extreme storms can disable wastewater treatment plants or cause power failures at sewage-holding lagoons.
And in a world altered by warming, where natural disasters are more frequent and water shortages severe, humanity can’t afford to waste anything – not even sewage, Flowers said. By reducing contamination, recycling water, perhaps even generating energy, the new system could address all these connected problems.
“We’ll show how this little community, a rural community in Alabama, will have a global impact,” she said.