What happens when you flush a toilet?

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Where does the waste go, and how is it treated? How efficient is the processing?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Not sure why this was flaired as chemistry.

There are basically two options.

1) Your house is on septic, which means the waste flows into a buried concrete tank called a septic tank. The solids settle to the bottom of the tank (and are digested by anaerobic bacteria,) liquid flows out of the tank into a grassy area called a septic field. And once a year or so you hire a company to come and suck the solids out of the bottom of your tank. This is common in rural areas.

2) Your house is on community sewers. All the drains in your house are connected to a single pipe, leaving your house, and going to a sanitary sewer main in the street. The sewer mains eventually flow to a central point, where the sewage might get treated, or it might get dumped out to sea or into a convenient body of water.

The treatment processes vary, some places literally just run the sewage through a fine sieve to get any solids out, other places will use a variety of chemical and biological processes to treat the waste.

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