Does the salty water in our oceans clean out the sewer water?

fishes poop, too.

it's a mighty big place, the ocean...

(dumping is wrong, just the same.)

Yeahhh... but don't usually little organism things eat their poop? I heard that somewhere...

Remember that a lot of cleansing goes on in our salt marshes. Anyway, that happened when we had lots of salt marshes.

I'm pretty sure that nearly all sewage in the US gets treated, at least to some level. I'm not at all sure about industrial wastes.

The ocean "metabolizes" most organic material (unless it is overwhelmed with volume in localized areas). The same is generally true for most natural ecosystems.

The ocean doesn't clean up the water. It dilutes it and most of the raw sewerage is absorbed by plankton and bacteria but still.

The large dumping of sewerage? That's why we find elevated estrogen levels in fish. Elevated Prozac levels and other mass marketed drugs we pee down the toilet in the blood of fish. That's why many beaches find raw sewerage and contaminated needles wash ashore.

That's why there are man made islands and islands of trash floating around the middle of the oceans.
http://able2know.org/topic/135302-1

The Jersey Shore gets occasional shut-downs in the summertime, especially after big rainstorms when the extra water flushes all the Canadian Goose crap out of the nearby lakes. It's not human poop, most of that is removed by your local water treatment plants.
Joe(what did you think they were doing over there?)Nation

Most of those shutdowns in Jersey are due to the overabundance of hypodermic needles and coliform.

You oughta see the West Coast of Mexico. They dont believe in much in sewage treatment. They use long pipes to take it out to sea and these create nice dead zones.

In New York City, when the weather doesn't cooperate and we get far too much rain, to keep the streets from flooding, the sewer pipes forgo the needed sewerage treatment plants and direct its contents into the ocean in its untreated form.

Ew. So we swim in poop and pee and drugs that have been digested. How lovely.

Ya know Rad, sometimes it's best not to dwell on these things. I mean, they've included carbon dioxide on the list of toxic waste materials. How guilty do you have to feel for breathing? That's not even considering who had the nasty stuff in their lungs before it got to you. And you definately do not want to start thinking about the fact that any material you can smell is physically entering your airways. Now, do you?

Haha, yeahhhhh, guess not.
I'll just relax and pretend the ocean water is a beautiful, sparkling, clean, crystal stream as everyone else seems to do.
& hahaha wow. To think about it, like you said, how many people had the air that I am now breathing, in their lungs before me? Interesting.
Except for the fact that their bad breath and whatever else that came out alongside with their exhaling breath, has long been lost as the ait traveled to my airway.... Hm..