The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
College students talk shit all the time, but not ecologically. A superficial conversation is shooting the shit. Something obvious is “no shit!” while “bullshit!” is a standard response to falsehood. If you care, you might give a shit. If not, you might get shit-faced at a party. And if the party gets too wild, the shit hits the fan. “Shit” is on the tip of our tongues, but we need to bring it to the front of our minds, because shit isn’t just a linguistic construct; it’s a daily reality. Americans make about five billion gallons of waste a day without even thinking about it, but we don’t know shit.11
When students need to take a shit on campus, they go to a specialized space called a bathroom. In the average college residence hall, the bathrooms seem a long way from environmental studies, but waste management is an environmental study. If you’re a human being of average size and weight, for example, your body produces about a pound of waste, solid and liquid, every day. It’s one of the few forms of production still remaining in America, one type of manufacturing that can’t be shipped offshore.
The process seems simple, but it’s fairly complex. When Joe College orders a cheeseburger and french fries, he chews his meal and swallows, sliding the food down his alimentary canal. There, a variety of digestive enzymes convert complex carbohydrates into simple sugars, transform fats into glycerol and fatty acids, and transmute proteins into amino acids and peptides. In Joe’s small intestine, these digested nutrients are absorbed by blood and lymph vessels to be carried into the circulatory system to feed various organs. What’s leftover is excremental, the waste that waits until, as the bumper sticker says, “shit happens.” When it happens, we head to the toilet and drop our load into a small pool of water where it’s submerged along with its pungent smell. After wiping with soft sheets of treated trees, we flush the toilet. To most of us, it’s not worth a second thought.
This hasn’t always been the case. Two-hundred years ago, college students disposed of their bodily wastes on campus. In the winter, people used bedpans, and then carried their waste to the outhouse. Removed from the main buildings, the outhouse was close enough for people to comprehend the problem (and the possibilities) of waste. In cities, entrepreneurs regularly cleaned “night soil” from outhouses and sold it as a fertilizer for outlying farms, providing a useful second life for what we call “waste.”12 After the arrival of indoor plumbing, however, when shit happened, it went down the drain instead of back to nature.
Most college students, like most Americans, live by what Philip Slater calls “the toilet bowl principle of American life”—out of sight is out of mind. But when the toilet flushes, shit doesn’t just evaporate. It travels through sanitary sewers to a solid-waste treatment plant. At most such plants, sewage receives several different treatments. After screening and grit removal, the mixture of excrement, urine, water, paper, and other items enters a settling tank. There, solids drop to the bottom so that grease and plastics can be skimmed off the top. The water heads for secondary treatment, where microorganisms