What does Cambridge sewage sayabout residents? MIT plans to findoutA new project aims to understand a city’s health and habitsthrough its waste

By Michael Fitzgerald GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY 09, 2015

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LESLEY BECKER/GLOBE STAFF

SOMETIME IN MID to late January, researchers from MIT plan to gather around a

manhole on Portland Street in East Cambridge, dressed in plastic disposable

biohazard coats and gloves. Each hour over the next 24, working in teams of two over

four-­hour shifts, they’ll sink a tube into the muck and pump one to two liters of

sewage water into a plastic container. The container will be put into a cooler and

taken to the nearby lab at MIT run by Eric Alm, a computational microbiologist.

Alm’s lab will analyze all 24 of these sludgy samples to see what viruses and bacteria

they hold;; meanwhile, a vial of each sample will be sent to another lab to be analyzed

for biomarkers (molecular or cellular flags for things like diseases and drugs, legal

and illegal ).

These researchers—who include architects, computational biologists, designers,

electrical and mechanical engineers, geneticists, and microbiologists—will be testing

an idea that’s attracting interest around the world: namely, that sewage can tell us

important things about the people who excrete it. Already, research has shown that

sewage can reveal illicit drug usage, the presence of influenza, the poliovirus and

other pathogens, and the state of community health. So far, however, none of this has

been tested in our local waste systems, other than some proof-­of-­concept sampling

done in Boston. That has led to this first formal effort by scientists and public health

officials to get a sewage snapshot of the people of Cambridge.

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Historically, public health officials have been stuck following their gut. “A problem in

public health is we are plagued by not having good metrics,” says Sam Lipson,

director of environmental health in the Cambridge Public Health Department, which

is facilitating the research. An exception would be the well-­documented health

hazards of lead paint. But for many other substances, effects are unclear, and morally

and logistically, city officials “can’t engage in controlled experiments,” Lipson says.

He hopes the new research will lead to better data around issues like diet and

wellness.

The MIT researchers have dubbed their project Underworlds, and it will run from

2015 through 2017, thanks to a $4 million grant through the Kuwait-­MIT Center for

Natural Resources and the Environment. Along with Alm, the research is being led by

Carlo Ratti, an architect and engineer who is a professor at MIT and runs the

Senseable Cities Lab, which studies how the physical and digital worlds blend. Yaniv

J. Turgeman, an architect getting dual master’s degrees at MIT in design and

computation and in environmental microbiology, is the research director, along with

Mariana Matus, an MIT PhD candidate in computational biology. Students and

professors at four other MIT labs will be involved in the project, as well as

researchers from Kuwait University and the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research.

“Sewage is really an unexploited source of rich information about human activities,”

Alm says. And why not? Trash dumps provide treasure troves for archaeologists

looking to find out how ordinary people lived. Our sewage, with chemical information

that comes straight out of our own bodies, should be even more informative.

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2011: Something in thewaterWhat drugs are local residents abusing? A

researcher’s solution to that vexing problem

suggests just how much our sewage knows about us.

Matus says the Underworlds project will test for three main things. It will screen for

viruses, like influenza, noroviruses, or enteroviruses such as polio or the nasty

respiratory flu called D68;; for bacterial pathogens like those that cause cholera or

typhoid fever;; and for biomarkers, or biochemical molecules, which include

pharmaceutical drugs like antibiotics, illicit drugs such as cocaine or

methamphetamines, and isoprostanes, which are compounds produced by the body

and seen as a proxy for societal stress and disease levels. Data on such substances

could predict epidemics or tell when they’re waning. They could also demonstrate the

impact of shifts in regulations, such as bans on using trans fat in restaurants.

First, though, the researchers have to figure out what time of day sewage is at its best.

Good sewage involves a maximum of toilet water and a minimum of detergents,

soaps, and other things that scrub out information. “We want the time when we see

the most human waste in the system, the most diverse hour for sewage,” says Newsha

Ghaeli, an architect who came to MIT in 2014 as a research fellow and is the

Underworlds project manager. (She concedes that she endures endless puns about

her research.) Finding prime sewage time is the reason that they’ll spend that initial

testing day taking samples once every hour, as well as some secondary samples at a

nearby Cambridge manhole that draws sewage from the Portland Street

neighborhood and a second, less residential neighborhood.

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The data from these initial samples will be used to help develop the Underworlds

software platform, which MIT is building to help analyze sewage information across a

detailed map of Cambridge’s sewers, correlating the data with demographic

information such as ethnic mix and average age. Then, in the second phase of the

research, the team will take samples from 10 sites in Cambridge (six residential

neighborhoods, two industrial neighborhoods, and at Harvard and MIT) over an

eight-­ to twelve-­month period. At this point, they will no longer have to gather

sewage samples by hand. Instead, MIT researchers are building 4-­foot-­high robotic

sewage samplers that can process and analyze the sewage, the data from which will

feed directly into the software platform.

The Cambridge tests will lead to one in Kuwait City, which the team expects to launch

in 2017. As in Cambridge, Kuwaiti officials want sewage tests to look for viral and

bacterial presences and to measure the impact of public policy. They also want to be

able to screen for biochemical threats.

What can be done with the data that will emerge? Public health officials might gain

information that helps them fight disease, and doctors might be able to care for

patients more effectively. Lipson says he’ll be curious to see if the tests find

hazardous wastes, not so much from Cambridge’s vaunted biotech firms, whose

discharges are closely regulated, but by other businesses, which are not.

One hindrance to integrating sewage sampling into public policy is the cost. The

filters that are used to capture bacterial, viral, and molecular substances cost tens of

thousands of dollars, meaning it will be expensive to test all the neighborhoods in a

large city. MIT is building its own prototypes, which have to be waterproof and able

to be remotely controlled. Eventually, such projects will be able to save money by

testing for a narrower range of substances. Still, Alm thinks private companies will

have to form in order to help achieve the necessary scale for sewage to shape public

policy.

Another concern could be the extension of the surveillance state into the sewers. But

it will not be easy to trace waste products, even those with legal implications (from

illicit substances, for example), back to any individual toilet-­flusher. The first test

neighborhood in East Cambridge has just over 4,000 people in it, and none of the

neighborhoods that will be tested will have fewer than 2,000 people. Turgeman, the

research lead, said via e-­mail there will be no way to link results to individual homes

or buildings.

Someday, though, he hopes people have the option to buy smart toilets outfitted with

sensors that measure what passes through them. Turgeman is working on making a

certain porcelain god more omniscient. If we choose to connect a smart toilet to the

Internet, we run a real risk of flushing our privacy. Until then, there are traces of all

of us in the sewers—and those will tell a different, more collective story.

Michael Fitzgerald is a freelance journalist who writes from Cambridge.

Related:

• The city is an ecosystem, pipes and all

• What ‘urban physics’ could tell us about how cities work

• 2013: The too-­smart city

• 2013: The DNA in your garbage: up for grabs

• 2012: Our underground future

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