City meets country: recycling Ideas and realities on German sewage farms

From the end of the nineteenth century, sewage farms were designed to clean urban waste water and thus improve water quality for residents downstream. From a rural perspective, they were a place where a flow of nutrients from the city could serve to boost agricultural production. Using the capacity of certain soils to filter pollutants, sewage farms sent waste water into designated fields and then waited until the water had trickled down into the ground; in many cases, drainage pipes helped to siphon away the cleaned water. Theoretically, they were a prime spot for waste recycling avant la lettre. However, the reality was more complicated: the recycling utopia became entangled in the tensions between city and country, severely curtailing its potential. By 1910, 49 German cities had sewer networks leading to a sewage farm; all in all, some five million people were feeding their liquid wastes into such systems. The geographic distribution was highly uneven. There were almost no sewage farms in Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg. Most of them were in the Eastern part of Prussia; the Prussian province of Hanover and the Rhine Province were almost free of sewage farms. The political debates, the public health debate, the development of urban waste water technology, as well as the tensions between cities and countryside are discussed to explain the short-term success of the system, as well as its decline, which had already taken place during the first decades of the twentieth century before the full force of the wastefulness of modern consumerism was felt.