When I saw the Burj Khalifa in real life I was truly stunned. Indeed, the tallest skyscraper in the world defies belief. Today I learned something that also defies belief: all the poop produced there has to be removed by trucks.
Let’s do the maths here. The Burj Khalifa has 163 habitable floors. It’s designed to hold 35,000 people at any given time. Now, humans produce 100 to 250 grams of faeces per day. Let’s say 200 in this case, since these people are well fed. That’s 7,000,000 grams per day, seven tonnes of poop. Now, add human-produced liquids and water. I think a very conservative total would be 15 tonnes of sewage per day.
That’s a lot of poop.
And all of it has to be removed by trucks every single day. The trucks take the daily production to a sewage treatement facility. It’s the same with most skyscrapers in the city, according to Kate Ascher, author of The Heights. Talking to Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Kate said that these trucks are in a permanent line waiting to get into the sewage treatment plant, waiting up to 24 hours before they can unload their load:
TG: Right. So you know, you write that in Dubai they don’t have, like, a sewage infrastructure to support high-rises like this one. So what do they do with the sewage?
KA: A variety of buildings there, some can access a municipal system but many of them actually use trucks to take the sewage out of individual buildings and then they wait on a queue to put it into a waste water treatment plant. So it’s a fairly primitive system.
TG: Well, these trucks can wait for hours and hours on line.
KA: That’s right. I’m told they can wait up to 24 hours before they get to the head of the queue. Now, there is a municipal system that is being invested in and I assume will connect all of these tall buildings in some point in the near future, but they’re certainly not alone. In India many buildings are responsible for providing their own water and their own waste water removal.
Yes, India and many other places in the world have this problem. India doesn’t have the amount of money that Dubai and its real estate developers have. That’s why this fact surprises me so much. A sewage system may be complex, but it’s not more complex than building these huge structures or their monorail. [NPR, NPR Transcript via Boing Boing]
Andrew
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 8:14 AMI’d imagine that good government legislation and mandatory standards would be what is needed to force companies to put in this kind of infrastructure?
Johnny P
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 8:42 AMIts all about maximising profits. Why foot the cost of an extensive sewerage system that nobody sees when you can pay guys in trucks peanuts to haul crap all day
Steve
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:01 PMThis is so hideously wasteful. I understand that it might currently be cheaper for them to haul the shit out on trucks, because they happen to have crude oil, but the complete lack of foresight is staggering. How much fuel is wasted doing this? Where’s the future proofing for population growth? What about continued expense of employee wages vs an automated septic system?
They built a mile high skyscraper in a desert. A desert. Which has no shortage of land for development, which would typically necessitate tall structures. On sand, which wasn’t ideal for skyscraper foundation. The amount of energy to pump water vertically up a mile alone is dizzying.
And I don’t buy this excuse about how they couldn’t justify the expense of a pipeline. This is Dubai. The city that has an artificially air-conditioned ski field in the middle of a desert and a galaxy of other monuments to excess. The second their oil dries up, Dubai will be the most spectacular meltdown in human history.
Antipodean
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:14 AMOK so we build the worlds tallest waste of money, and disregard the lack of plumbing in the city, great!
Sean
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 9:49 AMThe comment in the original interview was a general comment about skyscrapers in Dubai. I seem to remember reading that the Burj Khalifa does at least some of the waste processing in the building and treated waste water is used in its fountains.
Nathan
Wednesday, November 9, 2011 at 1:09 PMDubai will be the greatest post apocalyptic ghost town.
Consuelo
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 3:44 AMYour note is dated 9 November and the utube clip you refer to was done in 2008. The Burj was opened in January 2010 and I have never seen any of these trucks around it. If you are not happy living in Dubai, you can always go somewhere else, simple. Dubai is coming back with or without you.