Originally Posted By: tom slick
toilet would be OK, storm drains are not.
I can almost guaranty storm drains are not part of the muni treatment facility.
around here storm drains run into ponds or ocean.
Here, everything that goes down the drain, toilet, sewer, etc. goes to the Wastewater treatment plant. We have 12 treatment plants in this municipality, not counting Fort Bragg. That's 12,000 people to a WWTP compared to say, Los Angeles County which averages 2 million people to a treatment plant.
Larger towns, and smaller towns with inadequate treatment facilities, feel the brunt of the water contamination because they lack the means of collecting all wastewater. Here, dumping anything into a drain or toilet is a non-issue as it all gets treated.
If you are unsure, contact your local WWTP. Find out if they service all drainage cisterns, including sewer drains. If not, you could be inadvertently poisoning the towns water supply, though it takes a whole lot more antifreeze to poison a lake than people think. Right now soil erosion is a bigger threat to our freshwater ponds than a million barrels of used antifreeze. The eroding soil leaves the microbodies unable to feed, thereby killing the healthy algae that naturally de-contaminate the drinking water. Such microbodies are usually impervious to human chemical pollutant, only to other forms of bacteria.
If you follow such a line of reasoning, then it's more dangerous to dump your oil in the ground than it is to dump antifreeze down the drain.
