Canada dumps billions of litres of raw sewage into natural waterways annually. How can we stop?
- Media Manager
- May 6, 2022
- 1 min read
CBC
Written By: Uytae Lee
Published: May 7th, 2022
The solution may not be simple, but it's worth trying, Uytae Lee writes
And this is where we find the root of this problem: The amount of sewage flowing in a city at any given time is pretty consistent, but the amount of rainwater a city receives fluctuates wildly. So when there's a bad rainstorm, there ends up being far too much water flowing through our pipes for the sewage treatment plant to handle.
The result? All the excess stormwater and sewage overflows into a nearby body of water, whether it's a stream, lake, or beach.
Grey and green infrastructure
This combined system has historically been the system of choice for most older cities in North America, which means this is a problem pretty much everywhere.
In 2017, over 167 billion litres of combined sewage and stormwater leaked into water bodies across Canada, in every province except for P.E.I., Newfoundland, and Saskatchewan.
Billions of litres of raw sewage, untreated waste water pouring into Canadian waterways
So how do we stop doing that?
Well, there are many different solutions and they roughly fall into two categories: Grey infrastructure and green infrastructure.
