A Brief History of Sewage

This is perhaps my one and only attempt to write a semi-scholarly article on a historical subject. Public sanitation is commonly ignored, but of vital importance to human health. Water is likely to become the most valuable natural resource in the coming decades, but we treat it very wastefully, assuming perhaps that it is a limitless resource and that the Earth has an unlimited ability to cleanse it. I think that the advent of the flush toilet has also led to the development of the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality.

It's interesting that we see one of the greatest achievements of human "civilisation" as the development of cities (and now mega-cities), but this has had huge negative impacts on the general health of the population living within them. It was only through the work of true visionaries like Joseph Bazalgette, mentioned below, that many of us can now live fairly healthy disease-free lives within cities (like Mexico City where I am at the moment), with fairly reliable access to clean water. However, continued population growth and migration to cities threatens to undermine a lot of the advancements that have been made, and it must be remembered that (according to UNICEF) almost half of the population in the developing world - about 2.5 billion people - still lack access to basic sanitation.

A Brief History of Sewage