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The Native Americans did not have outhouses or toliets. They used the woods. Few people concentrated at any one site for very long; even long-term town locations shifted slightly each year, as the simple houses were replaced from time to time.
Soldiers during the Civil War did the same. When armies were on the march, regiments often avoided using the exact same campsite as units who had marched that route in front of them just a day earlier. The first unit may have picked the obviously-best location for water, forage, firewood, etc. However, if your regiment got there on the second day, it was often better to move several hundred yards away to find a cleaner campsite...
There was little need for a sewage treatment facility before people clustered into densely-populated cities. Prior to the automobile, the most obvious problem was horse manure on city streets. Air pollution from the internal combustion engine is not pleasant, but could you image our cities today if we were still relying upon animals for transportation - as we did just a century ago?
Only a few campers still use the woods, as in early and pre-colonial times, but there are still plenty of houses with outhouses in places like Carroll County. Pit toilets don't dilute waste. They isolate it, so it's out of sight and out of mind. They are easy and inexpensive to construct. If decomposition is slow, or the outhouse started with just a shallow pit underneath and it fills up, the outhouse can be moved to another site without any construction equipment. The waste in the old outhouse pits gradually dries out into a mass similar to peat moss, with no smell. Archeologists find such sites to be rich treasure troves of historic artifacts that were tossed away, and are now easy to excavate.
Outhouses are not ideal. That's most obvious in the summer, when decomposing human waste piling up at the bottom generates a most-unpleasant odor (except to flies...). In rare circumstances, however, that can make a pit toilet an attractive location. When Col. John Mosby raided the town of Fairfax during the Civil War and captured General Stoughton, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Johnstone of the 5th New York evaded capture by hiding in the outhouse. Today that location is the Bailiwick Inn bed-and-breakfast, across the street from the historic Fairfax County courthouse.
As described in Mosby's memoirs, the colonel fled out of his bedroom and "hid in the garden."1 The Confederates failed to notice him there. According to local tradition, however, the colonel hid underneath the toilet seat in the outhouse. (Imagine you were on Mosby's raid. Would you think to look below the toilet seat in an outhouse to find a Yankee officer? At last report, no Civil War history buff has re-enacted that particular drama.)
In August, 2000, an elderly gentleman in Carroll County near the Wythe County line had the misfortune of falling into his outhouse after the floorboards collapsed. He was unable to climb out. It took a couple of days before his rural mailman noticed the mail had not been picked up. He stopped to check, and heard a quiet call for help. Together with a neighbor, he was able to rescue the elderly homeowner, though it required climbing into the pit... [The homeowner who fell into the outhouse finally agreed that he wanted indoor plumbing. Carroll County requires that a house meet "code" before major improvements can be permitted, and his home was in no better shape than his outhouse... so rural housing advocates arranged for a two bedroom home with indoor plumbing to replace the old structures.]
Less obviously, the waste in a pit toilet can pollute the groundwater. The waste may be out of sight, but it's not necessarily staying in the pit. After all, like old municipal waste dumps, there's no liner...
Construction sites, airplanes, many boats and recreational vehicles, and some rural parks will have port-a-johns where you can flush the waste into a holding tank. The fluid is not the water used in standard household toilets. It blocks or masks the odor, and slows decomposition, until some lucky soul gets to pump out the tanks and haul the waste to a treatment facility.
If you live in the country, it probably goes into a septic tank near the house. There, the solids sink to the bottom of the tank while the liquids drain into a series of perforated pipes about 24" under the surface. The liquid seeps into the soil, where microbes digest the organic material and plants on the surface absorb the nutrients.
That's how human waste is transformed primarily into carbon dioxide, water, and biomass of bacteria and plants. The extra water and fertilizer seeping through the pipes in the leach field explains why the grass is always greener over the septic tank, as Erma Bombeck once wrote. Every 5 years or so, owners of septics pay a contractor to pump the waste at the bottom of the septic tank into a "honey truck" that will haul the solids to a treatment plant. Occasionally, a driver will just dump the load in a creek... but that's less common, now that the population in the country is greater and the sensitivity to pollution is higher.
If you live in the city, it probably goes into a sewer pipe. Where it goes from there is usually determined by the watershed. Gravity is the primary mechanism to move solid waste from the households through the sewers to a sewage treatment plant. Pumping stations may be constructed along the way to ensure a steadty flow - next time you're walking along a paved trail parallel to a stream in Arlington or Richmond, consider that you may be walking on top of a sewer line.
At the end of the sewer line is a wastewater treatment plant. There, the solids settle out, and most of the nitrogen is removed. Many (but not all) of the bacteria and viruses originally deposited into toilets are converted into harmless forms by the chemical processing at the wastewater treatmentb plant. At the end of the processing, treated wastewater is dumped into a local stream channel and flows downstream to... in some cases, an intake pipe for an urban drinking water system. For example, wastewater from Centreville/Manassas is released into Bull Run, flows to Occoquan Reservoir, and pupmed out of the reservoir into the Griffith Water Treatment Plant run by the Fairfax County Water Authority.
Some wastewater is used for industrial processing. In Fauquier County, the Old Dominion Electric Cooperative uses wastewater from the Gordonsville Wastewater Treatment Plant to cool the Marsh Run gas-fired power plant. The wastewater evaporates, reducing the quantity for which the utility must obtain a permit for discharge into the Rappahannock River.
The Norman Cole Wastewater Treatment Plant on Route 1 in Lorton is considering a partnership with the waste-to-energy plant along Route 123. Arranging for the solid waste incinerator to evaporate treated wastewater would allow the Norman Cole plant to increase the volume of wastewater it could process, without increasing the volume it would discharge into the Potomac River.
