Sewage ultimately ends up a) in a waste water treatment plant which then uses a process called flocculation to sort solids from the liquids. See the wiki here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocculation
I once did a job for KemWater in Finland which produces the Flocculants.
The b) part is the excess sewage which the plants don't have the capacity to treat. This gets pumped into the Thames or straight to sea.

It goes to the waste water treatment plant, which 'cleans' it up to some degree and releases into the local water system

oh. lol I just included this in my last reply.

They are channeled back to a lagoon, filtered, tested for solid waste (read fecal) ppm, treated with chemicals, and fed back into the water supply. At least that was the impression I got while doing a water quality science project in the seventh grade, during which I interviewed the tribal water quality specialist.

Is this actually true? Now I'm beginning to wonder because it does sound pretty icky. At the same time, water in my hometown has a decided swimming pool flavor and odor.

The solids go into my septic tank, where they accumulate and break down, and are eventually pumped out into a big ol' truck to the sound of the driver lecturing me, my wife, the dog, the neighbour, and anybody hitch-hiking about the rule not to put anything in the septic tank unless you've eaten it first. The big ol' truck takes the solids (along with others donated by my neighbours) for a ferry ride to a land fill where those old solids will never fertilize anything. The Waste water, on the other hand, keeps my lawn nice and green. (might need to do something about that).

waste goes to the main sewer at the street
goes east then south to water treatment plant.
where it is separated, the paper etc. slush to landfill rest of liquid to big tanks where bacteria do their job eating solids and converting it.
water is being filtered several times until it is VERY clean just about drinkable and then runs back into our river and etc.

while this is certain to be a non-award winning answer, i thought i'd go ahead with it anyway...
there's an episode of "dirty jobs" which explains this process in graphic detail; from the crapper all the way to the 'baking lot'.
other than order a copy, i have no idea how this would help.

Well, we recycle our bodily waste continuously

Here in midcoast Maine I can say that the fully composted 'night soil ' from about 3 years ago is now the fertilizer for the September 06 harvest of our Brandywine tomatoes

In the late seventies we had a hand built composting toilet made out of an oil drum completed with a finely crafted wooden toilet seat. In the late eighties we invested in a self contained Sun Mar composting toilet. This was due to the need for more capacity with two teenage boys in our family

We add to the toilet a peatmoss and wood shavings together with a microbe mix to help break down the waste. This all gets trucked up to the back of the gardenon a monthly basis where it gets mixed with other composting materials.

Our 'grey water' from dishes and shower goes to a leech field

As with many places, it goes to the waste treatment Facility. In las Vegas it is located near the Las vegas wash. Once all of the solids and bacteria are separated, The salts, dissolved medication and sort of clean water are pumped into the wash, and then Lake Mead, upstream from the intake for the Water Treatment Plant.

Into our recently rejvenated septic tank & leach field. Installed in '57, it had not seen service in a loooong time until it finally plugged solid and needed digging out. Estimates to get this done ranged in the second-mortgage area, so dig we did. There are some real trick ways to rehab a tank and line now if both are structurally sound. Inlet diverter pipes, outflow filters, tank cover risers, and the "Chinese Restaurant Sewer Grease Squad" guys who show up w/a diesel-powered, hydraulic feed extremely high pressure water reamer to clean out plugged leach lines. Back in action, things that get flushed now stay flushed. We pump it out every two years to clean out the bottom most layer of precipitated out solids, the pumper takes his loads to a sludge processing facility. The fluids from our leach lines power a now 55' tall Sycamore tree. Put in a T riser in the leach line to add copper sulfate crystals to brush back intrusive roots from same Sycamore tree.

Waste water goes to one of several treatment plants in San Francisco, where it is treated to near purity and drained to the sea.

to the sea.

When I flush, all refuse (solids and liquids) go to my septic tank. Solids settle to the bottom of the tank and liquids flow to the d-box and/or gray water holding tank. Liquids then flow to my drain field. Solids are pumped from my septic tank on an approximately 3-year schedule. The pumped solids are then spread in the valley by the pumping contractor.

My watse goes into a septic tank and then a drain field. Within the city limits it goes into a sewage system that is sent to a water treatment plant located northeast of town. There it is treated with chemicals before being released into the environment--the Missouri River.

Arrrg! How did I know that would be the next Question? In Raleigh, where I live, all sewage goes to our treatment plan on Crabtree Creek. Removed solids are spread to dry and then sold (soiled?) to farmers as added nutrient. The treated effluent is dumped into Crabtree Creek which joins the Nuese River downstream from Falls Lake, where it is picked up by the next town down stream and treated to be used as drinking water.

Durham is a bit different though. The City of Durham sits smack dab on the ridge line seperating the Nuese River basin from the Cape Fear River basin. And while all of Durham's drinking water is derived from the Nuese River Basin, we have three treatment plants, one of which dumps the treated effluent back into the Nuese River basin (to be picked up and treated and drunk by Raleigh) and the other two dump the treated effluent into the Cape Fear River Basin and eventually become part of the waters of Jordan Lake. Interestingly enough, this ridgeline happens to run down the center of the street outside my office building, so that my flushes go to the Neuse River and the flushes from the offices on the other side of the street go to the Cape Fear River.

Sewage system to the Metropolitan Sewage District and then into the South Platte.

Heh, heh. Vancouver is gross for this. It heads into the sewer, is collected and receives minor treatment at a treatment plant just north of the Vancouver International Airport (I think heavy solids are removed so it's just sludge remaining). It is then piped out into the ocean and released.

Funnily enough, if soil removed from a construction site meets certain standards, it can also be put on a barge, shipped out to the ocean and dumped. The ocean is our trashcan.

Generally, if it's not going into a septic tank right outside your house, the nearest municipality will have information about this. A quick phone call or e-mail could put one in touch.

I'm in Boston (Cambridge) where there is a city sewage system that feeds in several directions--the initial layers of solids are mostly directed slightly east to god knows which towns, presumably into fills. the bulk of liquids are directed to one of (I think) two sanitation plants, one in saugus I think? and the other somewhere south probably; the resulting gray water is directed into rivers and (mostly) the ocean. When I was little a dude came to my school to talk about it and he had water samples and gave nice part--per-million analogies.

hello id like to say sewage is quite tasty! at first it is abit chewy, but as you get older, it tastes more like chicken! urine makes it taste like dog food, so dont mix!

It goes through our city sewage system to the sewage treatment plant about 4 miles east of town into sewage treatment ponds. The solid waste settles out as a sediment (I don't know what happens to it after that)....

The liquid goes through a series of treatment ponds - we have tertiary treatment in our facility. Some of the treated water then is either piped to local ranches for irrigation spraying, and the rest is dumped/flushed into our local river (just above the tourist area).

Sewage - our utility handles it through the water plant by filtering, settling, treating, and then returning it to the Willamette river or into the system.

Personally, I figure that if you can't pee in the yard you're not quite "there". The compost-toilet option is very interesting. I still like outhouses and have a problem soiling clean water with poop.

I remember being in Nepal and learning about the water systems there. In a couple of the monasteries I stayed in there were outhouses built over the creeks - in one case, about 100 feet up in the air (and you could see down through cracks in the floor - quite an experience)

I learned that some of the streams were known as drinking streams and others were waste streams and that this system used to work for them until all the new development and the breakdown of local family/farm/history patterns made it so that the folks downstream didn't know which was which (and the folks upstream stopped caring)

No one with a septic system mentioned that the (semi-)solids are pmped out and then go somewhere. Where? When I lived in NH I knew they went to Moultonboro NH, or, when I was on town sewer the town (Sandwich NH) had its own large septic field. Now in Mass I don't know yet where the pumped sludge is taken... (Springfield?) Guess I should find out.

There is an interesting contrast between the answers posted by your readers in this column, and the answers automatically (but semi-intelligently) generated by Google advertisers in the right-hand column over there >>

Richard Veryard is correct that this question is one of those where the know-what is less important than the know-how -- and much harder to generalize. Maybe a good orientation would be a list of the kinds/name of agencies one might want to call locally. Start with the town hall, city council, and on from there. I guess a PERT chart decision path might be a cool tool. Start here, if-then, go to here, etc.

They flow, mostly by gravity, to the water treatment plant. There they are strained, settled, aerated, and cleaned by bacteria. Our community then has an extra step where the water is chlorinated and then dechorinated and run through a series of gravel filters before being discharged in the local bay. The solids are composted, dried and then sold to farmers for fertizer. I learned this by touring the local waste water treatment plant.

Septic tank and drainfield.

Except when the pipe broke....

For those of us who use septic tanks, above is pretty much teh answer.

For suburban or urbanites, ask your local city for wastewater treatment maps.

Unlike some of the other questions in your list, this question can apparently be answered in a generalized way, describing sewage systems in general, rather than the particular sewage system connected to my house. But it would still be less than universal; and if one wanted to produce a general answer instead of a particular answer, one ought to think about places that don't have sewage systems of that kind, or places like New Orleans where the sewage systems are currently broken.

Do the local details matter? Well, for people who live (or lived) in New Orleans, some of these questions may now seem rather more important than they did a month ago.

More discussion on the Knowledge and Uncertainty blog at http://www.dontpanic-ii.org/knowledge/2005/09/kevin-kelly.html

Toilet waste goes to the town's sewerage processing. I have no idea what happens to the solids, but, at least at one time, treated waste water was used to create a small lake just outside of town, where swimming and fishing are popular.

1. Ask the local council
2. Look up sewage treatment in the phone book. Go visit it.
3. Do a net search about how this works, generally, learn about it, THEN ring someone and ask
4.Ask the local enviro-friendlies

This I didn't really know to such detail.. Sewage treatment plant location was something I knew when I lived in Bayonne, but I haven't bothered to locate the sewage plant where I live now.

All wastes go through sewage treatment before the treated water gets dumped back into the Passaic River.

The solids and waste water go into a septic system were the bacteria decompose the solids into gases and water. The water and waste water seeps into the ground were it's filter naturally by sheets of limestone.