Can’t get your head around how much poo we’re pumping into the sea or why it’s being pumped? We’re here to help.
It’s hard to comprehend the sheer amount of shit being pumped into the sea off Wellington’s south coast right now. The numbers dispensed dryly in official statements are too large. Our neurons aren’t wired to grasp the scale of 70 million litres of waste per day. Perhaps the only way for us to get a handle on the turd tsunami is to break it down into more digestible chunks.
It helps to give your mind something tangible as an anchor point. An object it can picture easily. In 2014, the Herald pioneered a new technique for conveying size, helpfully telling readers a New Zealand record-setting 6.85kg baby was almost the size of seven 1kg blocks of cheese.
It may pay to return to the paper’s method. A litre is 1kg*. Moa Point is expelling 70 million litres of raw sewage into the ocean every day – the equivalent of 70 million 1kg blocks of cheese.
If that still doesn’t communicate the scale of the issue, maybe a sporting analogy will help. An Olympic-size swimming pool contains 2.5 million litres of water. Moa Point is sharting out 28 Olympic pools of pure uncut human waste every 24 hours and may keep doing so for months.
The median New Zealand man weighs about 90kg. Moa Point will emit 777,778 poo men today. The median kererū weighs 650g. Moa Point will pump 107,692,307 poo pigeons out by midnight. The median household cat weighs 4.5kg. Moa Point is right now flinging 15,555,555.56 faecal felines into the brown-tinged spray coming off the Cook Strait waves.
In a 1992 study, researchers found humans produce a median 105g of faecal matter per day. Let’s assume that faeces takes two minutes to evacuate your bowels. If you started now, it would take you 2,535 years, 15 days, 13 hours, and 20 minutes of non-stop shitting to produce as much waste as the Moa Point plant is expelling onto schools of unsuspecting fish every day.
But don’t start now. Keep reading. You need to understand. The total tank capacity at Kelly Tarlton’s Sea Life Aquarium is 18 million litres. Moa Point is divesting itself of nearly four Kelly Tarlton’s worth of poos, wees, general body fluids and toilet paper each day (screens are apparently filtering out the likes of sanitary items and baby wipes, at least).
Kelly Tarlton’s is an Auckland institution. Perhaps it’s better to paint this in terms Wellingtonians can easily understand. A can of Garage Project’s Pernicious Weed, one of our most awarded craft beers, is 333ml. Moa Point makes 210,210,210 cans of Poonicious Weed per day. A flat white is 180ml. It’s 388,888,889 flat browns a day. For the rest of us, a can of Monster Energy is 500ml, meaning 140,000,000 cans of Monster Effluent are exiting Moa Point every 24 hours.
Now that you’ve grasped the sheer scale of this catastrophe, you may be asking whether there’s a chance we could not shoot quite so much raw sewage directly into the eyes of our precious marine life. Unfortunately that would require going back in time and reconsidering some much smaller numbers. Ones that are easy to grasp. Numbers like four, three, two, one or even zero.
Those are the average annual rates rises councils kept in place for decades around the country. It’s now clear our local politicians were keeping costs artificially low, deferring important work in an effort to keep being re-elected. They were egged on by newspapers that now publish handwringing columns about our failure to invest in infrastructure and low rates campaigners who focused more on $80,000 art competitions than multibillion-dollar maintenance bills.
Now those bills have come due, and the invoices are printed in the form of faeces floating in our oceans or bubbling up in suburban streets. Councils are desperately playing catch-up for the years of neglect in the form of large rates increases, but they’ll soon be limited by legislation brought in to placate the ratepayers howling at having to face reality for the first time in years.
Soon we’ll be back to the status quo, and some mayors are already saying they don’t know how they’re going to pay for the infrastructure their areas need under the strictures of the government’s rates capping legislation. Meanwhile, the estimated bill for fixing our water infrastructure is still north of $180bn. Moa Point is unlikely to be the last poonami we face before that work is done. Small numbers, over a long period of time, can add up to a whole lot of shit.
*Pedantic editor’s note: The Spinoff wishes to acknowledge that while the weight of 1 litre of pure water is 1kg, sewage is denser and therefore a litre of it would weigh more than this. In the interests of not ruining the joke, and because the exact density of the sewage expelling from Moa Point is unknown, the writer’s flawed equation has not been amended.
