An example of a community sustainability failure..

For my inaugural content post, I figured I would post an interesting story I came across the other day (as you will rapidly become aware, I read the news a LOT):

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/01/07/bc-victoria-sewage-overflows.html?ref=rss

Essentially, the article discusses how the recent heavy rainfalls in the Victoria area, combined with excessive snow melt, have caused sewer overflows in a number of areas, spilling raw sewage onto the coastlines and therefore contaminating the areas with fecal coliforms, amongst other things.

The theme here is sewer infrastructure, a very local-style issue that all communities probably grapple with. Its safe to claim that in most older cities, the sewer and stormwater infrastructure is similarly aged and not built to deal with either the increased capacity nor the relatively recent public concern over the environmental damage associated with untreated sewage and stormwater discharge. Unfortunately, the extensive and subterreanean nature of our sewer system means that modifications and upgrades are costly, time consuming, and disruptive, which essentially leads to only the bare minimum of replacement work being done on them. This approach by local governments will not likely change any time soon, as there is neither a huge public demand for it nor a huge excess of funds.

So what to do? While lobbying for infrastructure upgrades to be included in the Official Community Plans of your local municipality is, of course, an important factor, it cannot be the only avenue used to reduce sewage and stormwater waste into our oceans and rivers. With this long-term shift must also come short-term action, mainly in the form of public awareness and exhortation campaigns.

For example, my summer job last year was to develop a series of informational bulletins to give to local municipalities, for them to give to business owners, regarding specific best management practices that various business categories could use to reduce their inputs to the storm drainage system. For example, telling painters to not wash their brushes over a gutter, but rather in the sink. (I did my best to give appropriate economic and efficiency justifications for these actions whenever possible.) The goal with this and with any other awareness campaign is that: if the public can be more conscious of what they flush, what they rinse down the sink, and what they let run into storm drains, it is a safe bet that the resulting stormwater and sewage outputs would be far less toxic and environmentally damaging than they are now. While this certainly doesn't solve the world's problems, it buys time until municipalities can scrape together enough funds to install a higher capacity and less leak-prone sewer infrastructure.

Unlike an issue like climate change, which essentially requires us to make a fundamental lifestyle shift, a local issue like sewerage can be very easily improved upon, with results that are immediately noticeable to local residents (e.g. no more sewage spilling onto the beach = a clean beach open for swimming). This should mean that it is also easier to motivate public opinion and promote community engagement on an issue like this. Now, if only we could do the same for climate change!