Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and to make it acceptable for human use. Although Britain has more than its share
of rainfall in most areas, southeast England is a rapidly growing and drier zone that
will soon outstrip its current reservoir capacity. This led to the decision to build
Britain's first major desalination plant at Beckton (east London). Operational since
2012, it produces 150 million L of water a day from the Thames estuary, supplying
1.4 million people out of London's total of almost 9 million inhabitants. Despite its
οΎ£ 270 million cost it will provide a useful alternative to the construction of expen-
sive and land-consuming new reservoirs and pipelines to serve London's growing
water needs. Hopefully this type of solution for water supply and the other policies
discussed above will be adopted in other cities in the world that are running low in
water, especially in developing countries where clean and cheap water availability
and delivery is still very limited.
Perhaps the biggest direct outflow problem, other than emissions into the air,
comes from the faecal matter disposal from urban areas. In the early industrial
world this was not simply from humans, but from the horses used in transportation
and the many animals kept for food in cities. Historically, the so-called 'night-soil'
of humans was often collected by a special class of people and used as a valuable
fertilizer on crops outside the city, or disposed of in the nearest water sources. The
system still exists in too many third world cities, while in countries such as In-
dia many people who lack access to toilets relieve themselves on pieces of waste
ground, creating a major health hazard. The growing size of cities in early indus-
trial Britain meant that waste disposal became a huge health problems and Edwin
Chadwick's ( 1843 ) report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population
publicized the need for new management procedures and technologies to remove
waste to improve the well-being and health of the growing urban population. This
eventually led to a 1846 act, The Nuisance Removal and Disease Prevention Act,
which began the process of regulating waste in London, in which a new city-wide
authority, the Metropolitan Board of Works became a centralized sanitation author-
ity responsible for waste management, which was followed by similar schemes in
other cities in Britain. Among the many provisions of the significant Public Health
Act 1875 was a requirement that made it compulsory for every household to deposit
their weekly waste in receptacles for disposal that would be regularly emptied by
the municipal workers.
In the developed world the widespread use of water-based toilets from the mid-
nineteenth century meant that extensive, connected systems of sewage pipes send-
ing the outflow into sewage processing plants were built in cities. These helped
solve the cholera outbreaks that devastated so many urban populations in the grow-
ing industrial-commercial cities of the early nineteenth century, where the untreated
human waste was just dumped into the local rivers, contaminating the ground water
and local water supplies. Although it took time to establish the link between out-
breaks of disease and the faecal-contaminated water supplies, most cities in the
developed world created extensive systems of water supply from reservoirs and
built separate sewer systems to take the flow from the increasing numbers of toilets
in buildings, which led to the development of sewage treatment systems to filter out
the harmful material. However, far too many cities still dump a large proportion of
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