Thinking About Septic Tanks

The modern urban lifestyle hardly ever gives a thought about sewage system. You have the conveniences of a modern toilet provided by your condominium building and local waste management utilities. A sewage system that takes care of human waste is always taken for granted. But when an urbanite finds himself in a remote town in a rural community, perhaps sent there by the government or his company on a project, living among the rural folks suddenly brings the basic necessities of home dwelling to the fore. The lowly septic tanks suddenly get attention.

But not when it’s working fine and doing its job. A septic tank is an onsite sewage facility where no government waste management utility exists to serve the local community. It is meant to contain human waste while decomposing and mineralizing it to make disposal environmentally safe and secure. The “septic” refers to the anaerobic bacterial condition in the tank that accounts of the waste decomposition. Needless to say, you need to have regular septic tank cleaning, maintenance work such as draining, removal of undecomposed waste, and repairs if needed.

Facing Waste Disposal Problems

So now, you hear about septic tank maintenance and it becomes a learning process for the urbanite in you. Most villages and communities have a sewage treatment facility shared by a few families, while the bigger homes have their own. Now and then, septic tanks problems can get into the open, something the urbanite rarely ever comes across in the metropolis. You could encounter any of that. Here are some.

• Non-biodegradable cooking oils, fats and grease, sanitary and tissue towels, cotton buds, plastic bags mixed with other hard matter that got flushed into the sink or toilet bowl can clog the drains and filters of the septic tank that can make them stink to high heavens and make regular cleaning a mess.
• Chemicals mindlessly disposed in toilet bowls like herbicides, pesticides, caustic soda, paints and solvents, bleaches and muriatic acids, to mention some are known to damage the working mechanisms of septic tanks that require expensive repairs or even replacement.
• Over time, pipes leading to drainage or leach or seepage fields develop biofilms that cause blockage called a biomat failure. You will either have to clean the pipes or have them replaced.
• Carbon monoxide is known to escape in the fermentation process happening in septic tanks. Pungent toxic gasses like hydrogen sulfide and methane gas are likewise produced. Nitrates and organic compounds degrade to ammonia that also escapes. Phosphate discharges into the soil can cause prolific algal blooms containing the toxic cyanobacteria. In short, where there’s a septic, the potential for environmental issues is high and is something that has to be dealt with.