Rose George

Penn

rosegeorge — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:52:55 +0000

I had a wonderful time, though brief, returning to my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I was there to deliver a lecture to 2500 students of the incoming freshman class, all of whom had been strongly urged to read my book as part of the Penn Reading Project, and to kick off Penn’s Year of Water [and sanition...]. So despite the fact that they had been raving until late at the Philadelphia Art Museum the night before (Botticelli and house music; quite a combination), they duly turned up for two sessions at the recently redecorated Irvine Theatre. I didn’t notice any falling asleep, and pleasingly there were students queuing up to ask questions, all of which were sensible, smart and impressive. David Fox of the Penn Reading Project told a wonderful story about how, after I had asked him the day before I arrived to pick up some biosolids from Philadelphia’s wastewater department, he ended up on a lonely station platform for an assignation and a handover, and felt like a character out of a spy novel. Anyway there they sat on the stage with us, though the cooler was kept closed, as I hadn’t realised they would be Class B and rather smelly (sorry Phila Water but they were), my favourite prop so far. Afterwards I participated in a discussion group with Dr Felicity Paxton, old friend, seriously talented professor and director of Penn’s estimable Women’s Center, and was treated to the smart, curious and still-awake freshmen at even closer quarters. It was a real treat. And it will take a while before I get over the shock of talking to someone wearing a t-shirt with my name on it. Thank you, Penn, and see you again in January.

Akvopedia

rosegeorge — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:39:19 +0000

Belatedly I have discovered Akvopedia, a wiki online resource about water and sanitation. Totally great.

Worms

rosegeorge — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:48:35 +0000

Possibly my favourite term in my book was “worm-burden,” which is what it sounds like. More than a third of the planet’s people are carrying worms around inside them. This wormy world is a new site that maps global helminth infections. Lovely pictures, interactive maps (though most still under development). Everything you wanted to know about worms but didn’t care to ask. With thanks to Sanitation Updates for the link.

Dig toilets not graves

rosegeorge — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:23:34 +0000

When it comes out your bum like a bullet from a gun/

When it’s just killed your sister and you’re really going to miss her.

WaterAid communications are consistently excellent, and so is this video. The banality and devastation of diarrhoea, in less than one minute. Go here for more information. And, laudable though Melinda Gates’ attention to diarrhoea is, rotavirus vaccine is not the only answer or even more than a partial one.

Infrastructure, bis

rosegeorge — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:10:27 +0000

Douglas Greeley, the Deputy Commissioner of the Bureau for Wastewater Treatment at New York’s Department for Environmental Protection, is a very generous man. When I visited him for my book, way back, he gave me sewer cover and fire hydrant badges, a copy of Art Carney from the Honeymooners, a series every American who was sentient in the 1950s will know, singing The Song of the Sewer. Doug is also curious; his bookshelves are full of works about the infrastructural history of his city, and on his wall he has a section of an early water pipe laid in New York. It is wooden, curved, and rather beautiful. I thought of this this morning when reading the latest in the New York Times’ praiseworthy obsession with infrastructure, which it points out is held together with Spit, Glue and Maybe Even Chewing Gum. There are no sewers in the story, oddly, but there is something about the waterworks in Alaska, which still run perfectly functionally using wooden pipes wrapped in iron.The state’s drinking water chief, James Weise, is quoted saying, “What we’ve found, kind of unbelievably, is that the wooden water mains wrapped in that wire actually perform better than ductile iron. They are less susceptible to fracture due to earthquake activity, and they are more flexible.” So of course the wooden pipes are being replaced with ductile iron. Whether they will keep things rolling along, as Art Carney would say, as well as the wood won’t be obvious for a century or so.

It’s Bank Holiday here. The sun is shining. People are at festivals and doing holiday things. In the spirit of those things, here are the lyrics to the only song about sewers sung to my knowledge on a mainstream TV sitcom.

The Song of the Sewer lyrics:

I work in the sewer,
It’s a very hard job.
You know they don’t hire
Just any old slob.
You don’t have to wear
A tie or a coat.
You just have to know
How to float.

Chorus:
We sing the song of the sewer
Of the sewer we sing this song.
Together we stand
With shovel in hand
To keep things rollin’ along.

I work down the manhole
With a guy named Bruce.
And we are in charge
Of all the refuse.
He lets me go first
While he holds the lid.
I’m telling you, sheesh…
What a sweet kid.

Chorus:
We sing the song of the sewer
Of the sewer we sing this song.
Together we stand
With shovel in hand
To keep things rolling along.

Oo-oo Oo-oo Oo-oo-Oo-oo

A funny thing happened
To Bruce yesterday.
The tide came along
He got carried away.
He come out in Jersey.
But it’s O.K. now.
Cause that’s where
He lives anyhow.

Chorus:
We sing the song of the sewer
Of the sewer we sing this song.
Together we stand
With shovel in hand
To keep things rolling along.

My father he worked
In the sewer Uptown.
I followed his footsteps
And worked my way down.
That’s how I began
In this here industry.
I just sort of fell into it.
Sheesh, lucky me.

Chorus:
We sing the song of the sewer
Of the sewer we sing this song.

Together we stand
With shovel in hand
To keep things rollin’ along.

© Matt Dubey and Harold Karr, 1955

Sitting

rosegeorge — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 21:47:29 +0000

Slate continues its laudable obsession with bathrooms and bathroom behaviour, with this splendid piece by Daniel Lametti on the posture of defecation. Sitting ram-rod upright to defecate is almost as insane as using dry toilet paper to “clean” your anus (it moves and does not remove), but not quite. Nothing is that insane.

Pee fuel

rosegeorge — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:39:52 +0000

Gizmodo has an interview with researchers Shanwen Tao, Rong Lan and John Irvine, who have developed a fuel cell that runs on urine. I found the post via do the green thing, which opened its summary with the ridiculous “Finally, a use for urine.” (Er, fertilizer? Wound cleanser? Antiseptic?). The Gizmodo piece, which seems to be from the New Scientist (it’s not clear), is thoughtful and comprehensive. I wrote a New York Times editorial on yellow being the new green. Here it is the new gold.

Gates Foundation

rosegeorge — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:33:38 +0000

Excuse the surgery-related absence. Some catch-up: The Gates Foundation has for the first time included sanitation in its Grand Challenges Explorations, “a $100 million grant initiative to encourage bold and unconventional global health solutions.” Well, it’s water, sanitation and hygiene to be precise, as those three should always go together. Researchers, the press release continues, can win “$100,000 grants to foster innovative projects that could transform health in developing countries. The initiative focuses on areas where creative, unorthodox thinking is most urgently needed.” There are five topic areas:

– Design New Approaches to Cure HIV Infection

– Create the Next Generation of Sanitation Technologies;

– Create Low-Cost Cell Phone-Based Applications for Priority Global Health Conditions;

– Create New Technologies for the Health of Mothers and Newborns;

– The Poliovirus Endgame: Create Ways to Accelerate, Sustain and Monitor Eradication.

Applications will be accepted up until November 2. There are more details about what they are looking for in sanitation here. It is a fantastic opportunity and wonderful that sanitation has been given the focus it deserves. Some clever sanitation whiz, please grab it and win it.

Bio-bug

rosegeorge — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 09:16:20 +0000

The Daily Mail introduces the Bio-Bug, a Volkswagen Beetle that runs on biogas (and calls it the Dung Beetle, of course). Apart from the usual semantic nonsense – if a car is running on the stuff, it’s hardly human “waste”, is it? – it is a nice piece about the huge, enormous, vast, untapped potential that wastewater companies routinely underexploit. The Dung Beetle is powered by biogas from Avonmouth works, run by Wessex Water. Its original press release, about a “car flushed with power,” is here. 70 homes could provide enough sewage to make enough biogas to run the Beetle for a year, or for 10,000 miles. If all the biogas produced at Avonmouth was converted to run cars, Wessex writes, it would avoid around 19,000 tonnes of CO₂.

N, P, etc

rosegeorge — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:02:08 +0000

I also missed this nice piece on Slate, where Sam Kean is blogging the Periodic Table. This episode was about nitrogen and nitrates, and then about phosphorus, and how we are probably running out of it. I have heard various estimates of when easily accessible resources will be finished, from 100 years to 30. Kean goes for 30. And sensibly, he arrives at the only possible conclusion as to where we will find replenishment: in the toilet.