Take a big concrete box, bury it in the back yard, run all your toilets and sink drain lines into the front of it, stick a few hundred feet of perforated drain pipe in shallow channels filled with gravel. Cover everything over with topsoil and forget about it. If you really want to you can dump some special 'septic tank bacteria' in it once in a while, or have it pumped out once a year. Most people ignore it - at least until it stops working.
Then you have to pump it all out, possibly even dig up the whole system and replace the field pipe, the tank, the lines, or everything. It is not exactly high technology, and it requires a bit of room (you couldn't have 60 septic fields for sixty houses in a 20 acre subdivision). You can't put them in where the water table is too close to the surface, or too near a stream/pond. I wouldn't call it wastefull. Some would like to make use of the methane generated, or the heat, or the composted solids. Others are happy enough to see it not get dumped into the local ground water.