Human waste backing up in basements is a gut-churning sign of US infrastructure problems

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Americans dump all kinds of unnatural stuff down their sewers -- paper (not a fertilizer), plastic, drain cleaners, ...

antiseptics (germ killers), caustics, solvents -- and that's just the stuff that's INTENDED to go down the drain from the minute it's made ! None of that stuff is good for plants, or for the bacteria that digest sewage in treatment plants. On top of that, people (and businesses) will dump just about anything down the drain, even stuff that's illegal -- old paint, paint thinner, pesticides (really bad for bacteria), herbicides (really bad for plants). And yes, drugs. And infectious waste. Both drugs and disease can be tracked by monitoring municipal sewage -- it's become an important disease-tracking tool, especially since the COVID pandemic. If Americans collected their poop in buckets and barrels and bins and took it straight to the fields that would be one thing (but still got to worry about infectious waste) but the problems of a modern municipal sewage system are orders of magnitude more complicated.