How seriously is the 2M dumping policy enforced? (Yet another poo question)

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by Adelie

This thread is supposed to be a discussion of sewage dumping. Global warming posts can go find the annual NorthWest Passage thread. Or some other thread that is related to cruising.

Yeah! Can we stick to just flinging feces at each other .

[sailorboy1]

Originally Posted by Woodland Hills

That’s the regulation, what is the custom? I am in Georgetown, Great Exuma Island.

You know where it is going and that is the custom. Just try to chop it up some, except for chicken bone as the sharks like to shot out from under the boat to eat that like corn on the cob. Pump holding at night is case peop,e likeswining during the day as a turd in the face makes a bad day.

[newhaul]

Now lets see what happens
https://www.kptv.com/news/clogged-li...1b63f.amp.html

Yes small by municipality standards but into the stormwater system and on into the river .

[JPA Cate]

The moderators have removed a number of posts with contentious arguments about climate change, which are not relevant to cruising. In general, even in Off Topic forums, posts need to have some relevance to cruising or sailing, or both.

We don't want climate change arguments on here, please.

Ann

[AKA-None]

Put a drop of poo water in a thousand gallon of pure water, would you drink the water? At how many drops would you stop drinking the water?

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by AKA-None

Put a drop of poo water in a thousand gallon of pure water, would you drink the water? At how many drops would you stop drinking the water?

Well, first off this would make it fresh water. I don't know of any fresh water lake that isn't an NDZ.

But regardless, the Canadian Recreational Water Quality Guidelines recommend beach water be monitored for the presence of E. coli using two limits; "a geometric mean of ≤ 200 E. coli/100 mL based on the previous five samples and a single sample limit of ≤ 400 E. coli/100 mL."

(E. coli in the environment is used as an indicator of fecal pollution. There are lots of other bacteria, and parasites, present in feces.)

Now, how that translates into "a drop of poo" in X amount of water is not something I can readily find an answer to, but I bet it's out there. But lets carry on...

1000 US gallons = 3,785,412 mL, therefore you'd need to measure 15,141,648 counts of E. coli in 1000 gallons of water volume to hit the single sample limit. If 1 mL = "a drop" (a reasonable guesstimate I think), then I think it's impossible for "one drop" to contain that much E. coli., considering the molecular weight of E. coli.*

Cut that in 1/2; we'd need to find 7,570,824 counts in 500 gallons, or 1,514,164.8 counts in 100 gallons. I still doubt we'd hit the threshold here.

*Someone up on their mole chemistry can do the math to confirm.

[AKA-None]

The point being if one keeps adding drops then at some point it isn’t clean. If each of us adds our own drops they add up. No matter how small we should all do our best not to become part of the problem as best we can.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by AKA-None

Put a drop of poo water in a thousand gallon of pure water, would you drink the water? At how many drops would you stop drinking the water?

Personally from experience i would draw the line at about 3oz lquid waste per gallon of pure water. Now the normal tap water you drink in 90% of first world households has more than that in it . But i do drink my water from a watermaker.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Peace, guys. Whether or not co2 is "pollution" or not is a meaningless matter of semantics. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, if you want to speak more precisely. "Pollutants" are "dirty", if you prefer. Or if you want to call any harmful emissions "pollution", that is not an abuse of the language. You're arguing about nothing.

Whoo, hang on mate. It's not just a matter of semantics.

I'm old enough to remember when a woman called Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring. The significance of the title is related to the fact that excessive use of the insecticide DDT was leading to the extinction of insect eating birds because it's ingestion lead to a thinning of their egg shells and the consequent breakage in the nests was leading to failed broods. It is considered to be the trigger for the environmental movement and heavily contributed to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

This lead to the banning of the use of DDT for agricultural purposes pretty well world wide but DDT could still be used, and was the most effective remedy at the time, for the eradication of malaria. It was cheap, harmless to humans and could be sprayed on the walls of village huts and onto swamps to kill the malaria mosquito with very little ill effect on avian reproduction.

However, the agricultural ban was not enough for the anti DDT zealots and they managed, largely through the United Nations, to get it's manufacture banned world wide. As a consequence malaria made a come back in many places and it was estimated that between ten and thirty million or so deaths resulted.

Another example of the misuse of a term which has become a semantic weapon is the use of the word "denier" in an attempt to equate those of us skeptical or agnostic about CC/AGM and every weather related catastrophe with those people who deny the occurrence of The Holocaust during WW2 primarily for political ends. These activities are rightly perceived by most right thinking people as highly immoral and it is quiet clearly the intent of the CC/AGW zealots to, through the use of semantics, brand those who do not agree with them as similarly immoral.

There are numerous other examples of where the semanticist zealots of one sort or another have misused words to pervert governmental processes
or attempt to silence their protagonists and it needs to be outed by the rationalists among us.

The problem with making irrational or emotionally based laws or regulations is that folks recognize them for what they are and ignore them. The consequences of this is that more and more of us become scofflaws thereby reducing the effectiveness of all laws and regulations.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by AKA-None

Put a drop of poo water in a thousand gallon of pure water, would you drink the water? At how many drops would you stop drinking the water?

That is exactly the question. And there is an objective, scientific answer to that.

Originally Posted by AKA-None

The point being if one keeps adding drops then at some point it isn’t clean.

Correct. At what the "some point" is, we can know.

Originally Posted by AKA-None

If each of us adds our own drops they add up. No matter how small we should all do our best not to become part of the problem as best we can.

No, not "no matter how small". How small TOTALLY matters; it's the crux of the issue. Do you poison the whole earth's atmosphere with one fart? Of course not. Even 7 billion people farting at once don't poison the whole earth's atmosphere. No more can 500,000 or however many cruisers there are in the world, even if they were all at sea at once and all flushing at the same time, poison the world's coastal waters, and not even close, not even within 10's of orders of magnitude.


At a certain level of dilution, toilet waste is totally harmless. It's an objective, scientific question whether discharging in a certain bit of water can come even getting close to creating a problem. We should be conservative and stay orders of magnitude away from any chance of creating a problem. But this is not hard. Good practice is described in those posts about how considerate cruisers behave in the Bahamas.

[RaymondR]

I have been pondering on how I might convert my existing electric, macerate-and-dump toilets into a sewage treatment system.

If I change the 20' of 1 1/4" hose to 4" hose and parallel my macerating pump with a peristaltic pump set up so that it injects a proportional amount of the chloride treater whilst I'm flushing it should do the job.

Nasties get blended with the bug killer and retained in the 4" long enough to get a good soaking before it passes out the overboard.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

I have been pondering on how I might convert my existing electric, macerate-and-dump toilets into a sewage treatment system.

If I change the 20' of 1 1/4" hose to 4" hose and parallel my macerating pump with a peristaltic pump set up so that it injects a proportional amount of the chloride treater whilst I'm flushing it should do the job.

Nasties get blended with the bug killer and retained in the 4" long enough to get a good soaking before it passes out the overboard.

They do or did make a system that used chlorine tablets like for a swiming pool inline with the manual heads efluent fo sanatize havent seen any of those type in several years . You should be able to google it up with a bit of searching.

[RaymondR]

Originally Posted by newhaul

They do or did make a system that used chlorine tablets like for a swiming pool inline with the manual heads efluent fo sanatize havent seen any of those type in several years . You should be able to google it up with a bit of searching.

The problem with using any sort of fixed dosage is that the concentration then depends on how long you keep your finger on the switch to flush. The advantage with a metering in of a liquid is that the bug killer concentration does not change no matter how long the flush.

However you'd want minimize flush volumes if you wanted to retain freshly flushed excreta in the 4" holding section for an effective period of time.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by RaymondR

The problem with using any sort of fixed dosage is that the concentration then depends on how long you keep your finger on the switch to flush. The advantage with a metering in of a liquid is that the bug killer concentration does not change no matter how long the flush.

However you'd want minimize flush volumes if you wanted to retain freshly flushed excreta in the 4" holding section for an effective period of time.

Thats exactly the oposite of what it does the % of chlorine is constant and actual ammount is regulated by length of flush

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by AKA-None

The point being if one keeps adding drops then at some point it isn’t clean. If each of us adds our own drops they add up. No matter how small we should all do our best not to become part of the problem as best we can.

I see DH has already beat me to the appropriate response. The fact is, there is a threshold below which it never becomes a problem. That is the point of dilution, or indeed sustainable resource use.

At levels where the ecosystem can manage the cost, be it pollution inputs or resource extractions, the system remains stable and balanced. Your "one drop" into the water ecosystem is processed by the water ecosystem. Up to a certain threshold the pollutants are no problem.

It is when we overwhelm the ecosystem that we then create problems. At that point, adding one more drop is a problem. But until that point is reached, it's not a problem. This is why it's not only fine, but actually preferable to dump human sewage in areas of good water volume/flow.