Today’s Op Ed piece on human waste treatment may be a harbinger of better times. I hope so, because according to one of my Village Trustees, about 75% of Village taxes go to our sewage treatment system.

A few months ago, a notice came around saying the Village would be sending a code enforcement officer to every house to ensure that we weren’t overloading the system with storm and sump pump excess water. Apparently, when the system runs over capacity, untreated sewage goes directly into Honeoye Creek! The nice officer came by, looked in the basement, looked at the gutters and gave us a pass.

As we were chatting, I asked if he knew of anyone doing greywater treatment in the Village. He said it was the first time he’d ever been asked the question- what did I mean excactly? I said, well, say I drain my washing machine hose out the window instead of down the drain, and into a reed bed or some other treatment in the back yard. That would lessen the load on the sewage system, and help to keep raw sewage out of the creek, right?

Oh no, you can’t do that- it’s greywater. Unless of course there’s some precedent elsewhere in the state where the DEC allows it.

Irony seems to be lost on government officials of all sorts.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Permaculture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.