What a waste…
Yesterday I got a tour of the water treatment plant and the counterpart waste treatment plant.
All the water we need is sucked in from the nearby McMurdo Sound and desalinated, cleaned, filtered, and then used. All the water we use is flushed down a drain somewhere, sent to the water treatment plant, cleaned, filtered, radiated, and sent back out into the sound. The wastewater outlet pipe is 1/4th of a mile from the water intake pipe, so it is a pretty safe bet that a lot of the liquid makes the trip two or more times.
What surprises me about this base is how good it is at recycling and the tiny amount of solid waste produced by 1000+ people. We fill a 4x4x4 foot box every three to four days. That is all. Left alone for a few days, tomato and other plants would start growing. Instead it is shipped back to the U.S. where it is burned or buried. It is not used as fertilizer because it has seeds from NZ in it since people fly through NZ to get here.
Until a few years ago there was no waste treatment plant, and the raw sewage was dumped into the sound. This evening I attended a science lecture on the environmental monitoring that is done around McMurdo. At this point our footprint is growing very very slowly. There is a large footprint due to behaviors between 1950 and 1975 when the base was built and grew, but there is not much increase any more.
