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Side rant. Convenient how we've created a problem that requires huge infrastructure investment. This was a solved problem with septic tanks, that we could have spent many many multiples of money on improving and making ridiculously fancy with sensors and motors and and and. But alas, government is the Big Job Creator. Got to feed that beast.

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I don't buy this cynical take. The current water treatment plants are much more complicated than a simple septic system which lack economies of scale and can still lead to ground water pollution.

Also, we've apparently transitioned from waste water being something that had to be dealt with to an actual asset. It can be cleaned to partial usage (and used for agriculture) or directed to help refill specific aquifers.

Septic tanks are great for single family-dwellings, awful for dense apartment buildings, and scale from great -> awful very quickly in between.

IOW, wastewater infrastructure is necessary above a certain density.

The irony is that wastewater infrastructure is one of the areas where cities often defer maintenance, leading to sewage backups when it rains.

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