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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

I live in Seattle, one of the most expensive cities in the US. Most of the houseboats on Lake Washington and Lake Union dumped their sewage straight into the lakes until the late 60s.

It was only this year that we passed an ordinance prohibiting dumping treated sewage from boats into Puget Sound and the lakes. That's a shudder-inducing thought when you consider that many of the delicious oysters we have here are directly under those boats, filtering everything they can out of the water.

Most of human history has involved treating bodies of water like magical devices that teleport waste away forever.

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> Most of human history has involved treating bodies of water like magical devices that teleport waste away forever.

For much of human history, bodies of water effectively did magically dispose of any waste. If you're a small family group or a small tribe, you can pretty much dump anything down a river with no ill consequences.

It was only once extremely large populations gathered around bodies of water for many generations while creating much more and much more toxic waste did it become a problem.

Well it’s also recently we’ve come up with indispodable items like plastic.

150 years ago, the entire human population could poop into the ocean and I’m sure the ocean would be able to handle it (given it’s not all in the same place)

The ocean is huuuuuuge. However plastic can survive for a looooooooong time.

> Most of human history

Most of life, really. It's only recently (the last century) that we've hit upon such economies of scale, population and production capacity that our natural renewal processes can no longer handle the load.

That, and plastic material making up much of that load. Dumping large quantities of wood =/= dumping large quantities of styrofoam.

Nope. I don’t eat oysters and if I see someone eat one I excuse myself before I vomit. Thanks dumpers.

But is there some inherent and real quality of biowaste that remains with the oysters after they filter-feed on it?

I thought federal regulations required the dumping of sewage 12-25 miles from coastline.

They do - this expands those regulations (which have exceptions for discharge of treated sewage) into a full-blown "no discharge zone" (NDZ), where even treated effluent can't be dumped.

As I understand it, the federal regulations reference distance from land - and the Puget Sound is really more of a sea than an open coastline. The previous regulation was something like being 3 miles away from land to dump untreated sewage.

https://www.marineinsight.com/tech/sewage-treatment-plant/

https://ecology.wa.gov/Water-Shorelines/Puget-Sound/No-disch...

Yes, like oasisbob says, the "treated" in my sentence is significant. Federal regulations prohibit dumping untreated sewage, but allow dumping it if it's treated (chemically broken down, I think roughly similar to what you'd do in a septic tank). Call me crazy, but I'm still not super keen on eating oysters that have had treated sewage raining down on them either.

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