Question: where does dirty water go

Senga Robertson answered on 16 Nov 2017:

I’m going to use toilet water as an example (because I think toilets and poo are funny) but this applies to water from drains and sinks and everywhere else too.

When you flush the toilet the water leaves your house via the water pipes, it flows through the sewer system to a wastewater treatment centre. The wastewater is treated using lots of treatments the first is a special filter to remove large particles (aka big lumps of poop), the second is bacteria treatment – the bacteria eat the pollutants in the water (pollutants=tiny bits of poop-yes, some bacteria eat poop, that is totally gross) and some of the chemicals we put in water like bleach and washing detergent, the water then goes through an advanced filtering system to get rid of any remaining chemicals the bacteria didn’t eat.
After all of that the treated wastewater is used again for lots of things like drinking water and watering crops. yes, you read that right…your drinking water has probably been peed out by someone in the past….but it’s been cleaned and recycled so it’s perfectly safe to drink 🙂