Where does the ___ go? Episode 1
Dear Sam,
We live lives that are absolutely over-flowing with magic at every turn. I don’t mean magic like the magic of a mountain vista or that of a new-born fawn taking its first clumsy steps, I mean the vegas-style slights-of-hand that take place every day and leave you feeling more and more confused and uncertain the longer you think about them.
The magic I am talking about:
The average American will flush a toilet 5 times a day. There are hundreds of millions of average americans. You do the math. Where does this go? How does this go? Who’s counting to make sure we don’t go too far over out 5-a-day flush quota? Who’s searching through it to reclaim precious earth metals?
The average American has no idea how a sink garbage disposal works. Do you know? Can you let me know?
The average American will dispose 15 kg of dental floss into the trashcan throughout their lifetime (I made this statistic up). How do millions of bins of trash disappear every week from residential homes the country over?
I have these same questions out here on this boat, and will stop at nothing until I have answers. So begins a series of posts I call: “Where does the ___ go”?
Today’s episode: poop.
Where does the poop go?
Using the toilets in the head (bathroom) are not so different from using toilets on shore. They are chairs with holes in the middle that flush. I think we all know what toilets are.
One essential difference is that these toilets run on sea-water, which means we don’t have to conserve the water as we do with systems like the showers and sinks that useon fresh-water. We’ve been explicitly warned by the Captain to flush early and flush often (that is not something you are taught to lecture on in ship-captaining school) because of the ever-present threat of clogging, so being on a seawater system is good news.
I assumed that because these toilets ran on sea-water, every flush of mine would immediately banish the waste out to the resilient, forgiving ocean.
That is just not the case. International maritime poop law decrees that there are very specific geographic locations that you can and cannot dump waste. Inland waters within 12 miles of land are no-dumping zones for untreated sewage, as are some protected areas. Likewise, there is a “discharge speed” set at 4 knots that you cannot exceed while discharging waste, essentially a speed limit or the ship to abide by while it dumps its sewage. That is a good deal slower than our usual 5 or 6 knots.
With no way to dump the waste regularly and without adequate long-term storage to last the whole cruise, waste is discharged into the ocean every few days once the holding tanks fill up. Did you want to know how I found out that sewage is dumped in large quantities all at once?
Sometimes it smells like poop everywhere.
You could be outside on the deck, inside sleeping, eating lunch, working in the lab sorting and measuring scallops, or flying the HabCam, but it will hit you. A stench. A stench you can not only smell but hear and feel. The bog of eternal stench. It feels you with dread and sadness and it’s what I imagine a dementor breath smells like.
Well the mystery is solved and now we can all rest easy knowing that the water we swim in is teeming with boat-loads of poop.
I would apologize for being gross and writing about poop but then again, you don’t have to smell it and I do.
Love,
Mike
