Blog 6- Blog Reflection- Sewer/ Sludge/ Waste

I live outside of a rural town 40 minutes outside of Winnipeg. I live 5 minutes from either small community. My household has its own waterwell and septic system that is not connected to anyone else. Where does your sludge ("biosolids") go?
What happens in my situation is that the septic tank collects all "biosolids", the liquids are released in our backyard into the ground. The biosolids are collected every 2 years or when the tank is full, it is then brought to a lagoon nearby where it then sits until that also gets full and needs to be emptied. The question I had when doing this blog reflection was: "Where does the lagoon get emptied and when?" Well, the answer is where else can it go? When the lagoon is emptied the laws state that they are required to inform all residents and farmers of that area before doing so. The sewage is then dumped, without filtration or treatment, directly into the Rat River. The lagoon does not have enough time to filter all the nutrients from the septic pool, therefore it is certain that it is solid human feces sent into our river. As for the liquids from my household they are released in the backyard out towards the wetland that we have in our backyard, which is very close to the rat river. I am sure most of this is filtered naturally and very well from this natural ecosytem, our wetland, that we have available. Our water comes from a personal water well that we have dug into the ground. We have never had problems with our water therefore the wetland we have in our backyard must be doing very good work in cleansing our water.

Does this surprise you?
This does not really surprise me. After learning about sewage and waste in class, I have come to realize that there is no modern, environmentally friendly way of dumping our sewage. Unless treating it, which has a high cost. But for rural areas there is no treatment area available. We use the natural environment as our waste dump, we only hope the land will continue to do its job. Where else would our waste go? As for the liquids being realeased into our backyard soil, there is no better way. We are using the natural ecosystem provided to us, which does not require any energy to keep running.
I am sure this is leading to eutrophication in Lake Winnipeg but there is nothing me or you can do as individuals to stop this, we could only make awareness of this problem.