It is well known that the wastewater infrastructure in America is deteriorating and, in many areas, so far gone as to contribute significantly to groundwater and surface water pollution.

Many sewer systems exceed 50 years old, and many carry combined stormwater and sanitary/industrial wastewater. To compound an already intolerable problem, we continue to build new sewers on the fringes of these old systems and connect them to the same leaking lines, further increasing the pollution load on our water environment.

Sure, we spend tremendous sums of money each year in lining or replacing aged and deteriorated sewers. But do expensive Band-Aid remedies for sewers move us toward wastewater management and sewer systems that are sustainable far into the future?

More than two thousand years since the construction of the Roman Cloaca Maxima (Great Sewer), we are still building sewers to simply convey our wastewaters away from our citizens. True, unlike the early Romans, we do convey wastewater to a treatment site and reduce the pollutants to a greater or lesser degree. But we still dump the effluent into the nearest water body, thereby wasting what is a valuable resource.

Over the past 100 years, engineering and equipment for wastewater management for individual structures and small communities have evolved from cesspools through septic tank/drainfield systems to complex treatment systems producing effluents reused in the local environment.

These systems, termed onsite, decentralized, cluster, ATUs, drip and other often confusing names, encourage residential, commercial or mixed development in rural and suburban areas. Most use land-based treatment or land-based dispersal of effluent. They discharge no wastewater to surface waters and, with good management and regulation, the effluents percolating into the ground pose no threat to health or environment.

Unfortunately, most municipal officials see these systems as threats to the continued growth of their legacy wastewater systems. Those threats are unfounded. What is threatened is the classical paradigm of the function and design of municipal sewers.

The federal grant programs of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s paid for expansion of existing sewer collection and treatment systems. As a result, engineers, regulators, and elected officials had no incentive to develop technologies, regulatory programs, political structures, or planning tools needed to achieve long-term, sustainable wastewater management systems.

Even though the grant programs are long gone, we continue to struggle to impose only immediate or short-term fixes to our sewer infrastructure problems, with little or no thought to long-term sustainability.

We have the wherewithal to collect, convey, treat, and reuse wastewater in ways that are at least environmentally benign but more often beneficial. The City of Piperton, Tenn., for example, is doing it by taking ownership of subdivision wastewater systems, using fixed-film reactors with drip dispersal of the treated effluent inside the subdivision.

The City of Maryville, Tenn., is serving some isolated or difficult-to-serve portions of the city with septic tank effluent pumping (STEP) collection systems discharging to city sewers.

The Town of Blacksburg, Va., is requiring all development in a sensitive watershed at the edge of the town to use clustered STEP systems with discharge to the city sewer system or with treatment and drip dispersal within the subdivision.

The Solaire, a 239-unit high-rise apartment building in New York City, uses its own membrane bioreactor in the basement to provide reuse-quality water for toilet flushing and park irrigation. North Carolina State University uses treated wastewater and stored rainfall runoff for boiler feedwater makeup and irrigation of landscapes and recreational fields.

Although these are isolated examples of more sustainable wastewater management, collectively they demonstrate that we don't have to wait for new engineering, technologies or equipment to begin to solve our sewer infrastructure problems, or at least to prevent the continued growth of future problems. Collectively, these methods are referred to as distributed sewer.

The term "distributed sewer" simply means the intermingling of whatever technologies and systems work together to alleviate additional load on existing systems, provide an environmentally positive return on investment, and move us toward long-term sustainable wastewater infrastructure.

While the technology and engineering are readily available to make the distributed sewer concept work, the political will is lacking, and the "but we've always done it this way" momentum is strong. Still, there is no time like the present to begin the work toward change. And our onsite/decentralized industry is perfectly capable of leading that effort. O