Researchers Try To "Close the Nutrient Cycle" Through Better Waste Recycling 112
An anonymous reader writes "Converting human waste into usable fertilizer may become the next important development in sustainable living. 'Most conventional farms invest in synthetic fertilizer, which requires energy to produce and is associated with many environmental problems of its own. But by separating out human urine before it gets to the wastewater plant, Rich Earth cofounder Kim Nace says they can turn it into a robust fertilizer alternative: a "local, accessible, free, sanitary source of nitrogen and phosphorous."'"
New Meaning to the phrase: (Score:1)
Re:New Meaning to the phrase: (Score:4, Interesting)
A colleague of mine works on phopshorus (P) removal from waste water treatment plants. In his presentations he always talks about the P lost down the toilet, how much that costs to treat and how much could be made recovering it and selling it for fertilizer, and then throws out the phrase "there's a gold mine of P in there". The crowd never seems to know how to take that.
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Re:New Meaning to the phrase: (Score:4, Funny)
Some stay dry, others feel the pain.
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What do you think "Organic" food is grown from?
Manure has been a source for fertilizers for many centuries.
Human waste has the issues is the fact that Humans are a dirty animal, and our germs that makes us sick, will spread to make other people sick.
Night Soil (Score:5, Informative)
I believe "nightsoil men" used to sell the human waste they carried away to tanners and farmers. In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one. The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon.
Re:Night Soil (Score:5, Informative)
I believe "nightsoil men" used to sell the human waste they carried away to tanners and farmers. In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one. The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon.
Not entirely but the extent to which we fail to recycle human excrement and urine is quite new. Many ancient societies used human waste for fertiliser although that can be a health hazard. In Roman times tanners, people who dyed cloth and other such businesses actually had pissoires [wikipedia.org] outside their shops and big signs inviting customers to please come over and relieve themselves. Apparently tanners and dyers processed the urine to get Ammonia rich solutions which they used to prepare their products. I remember a QI episode where Stephen Fry dropped this fact-bit about how the House of Lords in London used to reek of stale piss on rainy days because of the quantities of urine used to in the production of tweed fabric which was popular with the upper classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
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Apparently tanners and dyers processed the urine to get Ammonia rich solutions which they used to prepare their products.
Urine was also widely used for cleaning (in the Middle Ages that I know of, and probably other times). It's not surprising, when you consider that ammonia is used for cleaning today. Methinks an important step was to thoroughly rinse things after cleaning.
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I large cities with unknown pathogens throughout using human waste on ANY product that humans will eat is a recipe for a massive health epidemic. Pathogens such as hepatitis can survive the treatment process and remain live in the compost. This doesn't even take into account all the other stuff that's in the waste stream, from the soap you used in the shower to the drano you poured down the sink to clear it. Wastewater is dangerous stuff, it should be properly treated and then processed into very fertilizer
Re:Night Soil (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Night Soil (Score:5, Informative)
The nightsoilmen (toshers) processes, while imperfect, were much less toxic than what they were replaced by - Whitehead's flush toilet (which drove them out of business). The outflow from flush toilets in London were directed into the same dry pits as the toshers worked from, making the pits impossible to manage. With no downstream plan for the new flush toilet technology, "The Great Stink of London" came from the stormwater runoff into the Thames, which caused thousands of death in cholera epidemics.
You are right, the work should not perhaps be romanticized, but was not given any incentive to improve... it was flushed away by the new million dollar flushable toilet technology industry. The fact is that the toshers/nightsoil industry created better than average pay in London, certainly much better than blackleg coal mining. But the marketers of "flush toilet technology" stigmatized them, and the sewage treatment plants of today are seen by many in the environmental community as a "correction" to a technological advance. http://retroworks.blogspot.com... [blogspot.com]
During the mid 1800s another "technological advance" was the sale of mercury as a laxative. I guess it gives great bowel movements (Lewis and Clark's expedition can be tracked today by the mercury laxative residue - they ate a lot of elk and not much fiber). What I find fascinating are the parallels between the toshers and the past decade of private sector electronic waste management. Most of the "export market" buyers of used CRTs turned out to be not primitive wire burners but factories formerly licensed by Proview, BenQ, Wistron, Foxconn etc., which were purchasing very specific models of CRT for refurbishment and sale to markets like Cairo, Lagos, Jakarta and New Dehli. Like the nightsoil workers, they were flooded with product and then denigrated as "primitive recycling". The CRTs were diverted to a shredding industry designed for scrap metal. Leaded glass cullet doesn't shred well, and the glass diverted from reuse private markets still lies around. At one of the largest sites, in Hallstead PA, floodwaters engulfed the CRT cullet piles twice in the past decade, leading to the closure of the recycling facility last summer. http://resource-recycling.com/... [resource-recycling.com]
Re:Night Soil (Score:5, Interesting)
"The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon." I can tell you, from a wonderful tour of the Stickney sewage treatment plant outside of Chicago, that in the 70's the solid-waste output was determined to be too contaminated with cadmium to be safe for human food crops. Cadmium comes from the blue dye in jeans, which is washed away in the laundry.
Nowdays, as a poster below has pointed out, pharma and it's metabolites will probably be the challenge.
Re:Night Soil (Score:5, Interesting)
That's quite a different problem. Cadmium is an element. Pharmaceuticals and their metabolic products are organic, and consist of the same elements as the desired stuff. Unlike cadmium, you can often get rid of them simply by applying high-enough temperatures.
Night Soil and beyond (Score:2)
Yes, especially in China: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
Which is part of how they have been "Farmers of 40 Centuries": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
I've been interested in this from the point of view of space colonies. Biosphere II did this:
http://www.janepoynter.com/doc... [janepoynter.com]
http://www.globalecotechnics.c... [globalecotechnics.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/11... [nytimes.com]
http://b2science.org/news/1453 [b2science.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
As did John Todd at Ocean Arks commercially for towns needing sewage treatment:
http://www.oceanarksint [oceanarksint.org]
Re:Night Soil and beyond (Score:5, Interesting)
To the countries listed in your first link, I'd add Korea. My father was there in the late 1940's with the US Army, and he said human waste was widely used as fertilizer (Korea was a very different place back then). The army even offered their waste to the locals (an offer genuinely meant to be helpful), but the farmers said that Americans used too much toilet paper.
Re your 2nd link, it's interesting that even in 1909 there were Americans who were interested in how there are parts of East Asia where the same fields have been used for millennia, and are quite productive.
Obviously using raw human waste is a major health problem, but processed stuff works great. The National Geographic article mentions urine in specific, apparently because it takes less energy and effort to separate out the useful stuff. It surprises me that it "contains 80 percent of the nitrogen and 55 percent of the phosphorous", because I usually think of manure being used for fertilizer. Does the animal urine go to waste, or is it used by, for example, having livestock graze in fallow fields?
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Thanks for the informative reply. On livestock, sadly with so many Confined Animal Feeding Operations, it seems their waste from CAFOs will go to "waste" in huge lagoons? But I'm not sure if that is just manure or whether the urine goes into such lagoons too. From:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
http://www.nrdc.org/water/poll... [nrdc.org]
"According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a non-profit environmental advocacy group, these lagoons often break, leak or overflow, allowing microbes from animal was
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Does the animal urine go to waste, or is it used by, for example, having livestock graze in fallow fields?
Probably yes mostly and yes. But... how would one go about collecting it? I don't think catheders would pass muster with the SPCAs.
Modern Day Equivalent (Score:4, Funny)
In efforts to expand our recycling program:
Thank you for your mandatory participation in our municipal recycling program.
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Those that object to the municipal recycling service go in the purple bin.
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I thought that was the Soylent Green bin?
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In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one.
Yeah, so are the cholera and other diseases that used to come with open sewers and untreated waste. You have to be very careful with how you use that stuff.
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You make a good point. IIRC it takes a lot more animal manure (in weight and volume) to fertilize a field than artificial fertilizer. That wasn't a problem when many or most farms raised both livestock and crops (I believe the Amish still do it that way). If they're far apart though transportation costs and energy become a problem, which I imagine is the same whether you're using livestock or human waste. I wonder if that's less of an issue with urine though? How much energy would be required to evaporate i
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Pathogens - breaking the cycle. (Score:2)
Using any animal's waste as a fertilizer for its food is a recipe for a health disaster. Some pathogens are extremely hard to denature. Two examples come immediately to mind: Hepititis viruses and CJD prions (a human version of "mad cow"). Even if a process were effective, any failure, even short term, becomes an immediate disaster.
Instead, if waste is to be recycled, it is far better to recycle it as nutrients for a different species, the more different the better. For instance, human waste might fert
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An example would be replacing h from the bacteria in the root nodes of soybeans or clover.)
Should have been:
An example would be replacing lost fixed nitrogen with newly fixed nitrogen derived from the bacterial in the root nodes of soybeans or clover.
===
If you must recycle an organism's waste into its food supply, the more, and more diverse, steps it goes through on the way, the less chance for pathogens to also be "recycled" into new infections.
We flush more (Score:3, Interesting)
The amount of drugs and toxic things we flush are more of a problem than simply reformulating urine.
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It's not entirely an untrue point, but: define "toxic things" because that's a pretty ambiguous term.
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Viagra and several antidepressants are now at high enough levels where they can be detected in rivers downstream from sewage treatment plants.
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Those aren't really toxic. Not under EPA toxicity standards.
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Re:Ick is right (Score:5, Informative)
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Antidepressants have been found [salon.com] in urban drinking water supplies."
Who drinks tap water?
Unless you have one of those osmotic filters
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Your bottled water is tap water run through a charcoal filter. So, you are drinking tap water everyday.
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I always trink tap water at home. Seems that the antidepressants in the urban drinking water are only in homeopathic quantities, because I am still a very unhappy person altogether.
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It's a Commie plot! (Score:2)
That's why I only drink grain alcohol...
The chemistry works out... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The chemistry works out... (Score:5, Informative)
From the FAQ:
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Let's do the same for what we eat, and let's make the humanity sterile, those endocrine thingies only affect pussies.
Coffee (Score:1)
That is funny, because it is already known to be a problem for reprocessed water [nih.gov].
Let's do the same for what we eat, and let's make the humanity sterile, those endocrine thingies only affect pussies.
Dude, go get another cup of coffee or something. The GP addressed all of your points.
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Re:The chemistry works out... (Score:5, Interesting)
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I only fear shoddy implementations similar to those in other industries
Not the GP, but you raise good points. The only way to deal with that is described by what some consider a dirty word: regulation. We have regulation of food and water quality, which especially in the former is far from perfect, but a helluva lot better than a completely unregulated situation. This seems like something that should be regulated in a similar way. The trick is to establish guidelines and regulations before this becomes a major industry.
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Not just ingested chemicals. Toilet bowl cleaners, discarded household chemicals, paint, cosmetics, food dyes, commercial/industrial waste... Anything anyone ever flushes or pours down the drain, from a home or business.
There was recently news about Whole Foods being caught accepting food grown on sewage without informing their customers. In a modern society where thousands of chemicals are commonly used by people who generally don't even know what those chemicals are, even if the urine were separated out f
recycling programs (Score:2)
How long until municipalities have a mandatory yellow box?
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Yours doesn't? Why does your town hate mother earth?
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Single Stream is the way to go.
Makes Sense (Score:1)
I've been peeing on trees in the forest whenever I go camping for a long time... and they seem to be doing well enough.
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Your contribution is small. Does a bear piss in the forest?
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Your contribution is small. Does a bear piss in the forest?
Only if they haven't installed a lav under the stairs.
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Your contribution is small. Does a bear piss in the forest?
Well, let me have some beer and we'll talk after.
unfortunately... (Score:2)
Again and again... (Score:1)
C'mon folks!!! Milorganite - since 1925 - "Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen"!
Just like Soylent Green... "It comes from People!!!"
Is It Safe? (Score:4, Interesting)
Since epidemiology is well outside my area of expertise, I have to ask: would this be safe?
With artificial fertilizers we don't have to be concerned about the purity of the material, whereas if we were to use natural fertilizers (animal or otherwise) it introduces all of the impurities and other undesirable byproducts that come with waste. And if we're talking about human waste in particular, does that mean this would create a new cycle for pathogens? Or is there a way to process waste to remove pathogens?
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It sounds similar to a composting toilet [wikipedia.org], but on a larger scale. Certainly not a new idea if you've ever used a bathroom in a national park. Microbes love our excrement...
I believe it's possible to purchase a kit, at some cost, to retrofit one's house to use a self-contained system. Various environmental standards, obviously, need to be met to ensure the safety of one's backyard vegie patch.
As for toxins and pathogens, I think it's dependent on the amount of filtration, i.e. you're not pouring your poo dire
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Artificial fertilizers I would be more concerned about. We humans like to simply our understanding of things and then we act on them based on our simplified models. "Pure fertilizer" would likely be missing some important 'other things' which generally occur within nature. To put it in ways which are more understandable:
Homegrown, organic tomatoes are absolutely rich, meaty and flavorful. Industrial tomatoes are red balls with squishy water in them. They lack texture and flavor. I tend to thing there
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It's a shame no well blinded study has ever fact your belief that 'organic' tomatoes taste better.
It underscores your ignorance of what organic is.
" We humans like to simply our understanding of things and then we act on them based on our simplified models."
think upon that before posting.
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Dunno about store-bought 'organic' tomatoes, but home-grown tomatoes are wonderful and only vaguely resemble the pink baseballs supermarkets try to pass off as "vine ripened tomatoes". One of the few complaints that I have about living in Seattle is that the climate is not really conducive to growing tomatoes (but I'll put up with reduced harvests in lieu of sweating all summer).
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Re:Is It Safe? (Score:4, Informative)
Since epidemiology is well outside my area of expertise, I have to ask: would this be safe?
With artificial fertilizers we don't have to be concerned about the purity of the material, whereas if we were to use natural fertilizers (animal or otherwise) it introduces all of the impurities and other undesirable byproducts that come with waste. And if we're talking about human waste in particular, does that mean this would create a new cycle for pathogens? Or is there a way to process waste to remove pathogens?
Having recently become much more educated than I used to be on this subject, I now find it hilarious (and a bit frightening) how disconnected modern society has become from good old Mother Nature. If you'll stop and think a moment you'll realize that we live on the surface of a planet where quadrillions of living organisms have been living, dying, urinating and defecating for billions of years, and until a veritable blink-of-an-eye ago there were no "waste treatment facilities" anywhere to be found. The very fact that our civilization requires artificial "waste treatment facilities" in order to survive is a symptom of just how totally disconnected we are from the natural cycles of life. Every living thing that has ever existed here for billions of years has lived by recycling nutrients from the bodily decay or waste products of other living things.
So, asking "if there is a way" to process waste to remove pathogens is a question that should answer itself now that we are all in the correct mindset. The answer of course is that nature _is_ a gigantic and unbelievably effective and efficient waste reprocessing facility. Step out of the door of your artificial housing construct and walk to any nearby location where you might be able to grow a plant and look down. That stuff underneath your feet is called "dirt". It's composed of minerals extracted from the air by plants, leeched out of rocks by water, and more rock bits ground up by glaciers. But most importantly it's composed of lots of chemicals and compounds that either used to be part of the body of some animal or plant, or was a waste product of a living organism. If dirt, the infinitely reprocessed waste product of billions of previous excreting organisms, was going to hurt us we'd already all be long dead.
The bacteria and other organisms that live in dirt evolved to live on the kinds of things we refer to as "waste". They reprocess it into yummy fertilized soil that plants love to grow in, and in the process kill off all the things we call "pathogens" that evolved to live inside us and are excreted in our waste. The worms and soil bacteria and the eventual heat of the full composting process creates a perfectly safe fertilizer from any kind of animal "manure", including human. They even have a name for the manure that comes from us: Humanure.
Using this purifying ability of nature, we can even make cheap and highly effective water filters [wikipedia.org] that work by letting the soil bacteria in a column of sand kill off the "pathogens" in contaminated water as it trickles through the filter. The soil bacteria just gobbles up and destroys everything that we would refer to as a pathogen. Chemical toxins of course are a different matter. Many of those are unnatural to the environment and have to be dealt with in other ways, unfortunately. But animal waste? No problem. Nature takes care of that quite easily.
Now, the issue of urine separation turns out to be interesting for multiple reasons. Using urine separating toilets not only makes it immensely easier to separately process and use the urine for fertilizer, it also allows one to have a composting toilet that doesn't smell bad and holds a surprising amount of waste before it needs to be emptied. Apparently that horrible latrine, RV/boat holding tank smell is caused not by the solid waste itself but by mixing the urine and solids. Separating the urine and throwing a layer of something organic like peat moss
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Who's laughing now? (Score:2, Funny)
Old Tech. (Score:2)
Honestly this has been done for centuries, http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb... [amazon.com] and there are tons of books on it.
This is important but also concerning (Score:2)
Back in ancient Japanese times, the smell of feces was referred to as the smell of life. A rather positive spin on things but it's also important to note that they actually did what is being discussed in the article. They used human fecal matter in their farming.
But what about today? The stuff we eat isn't exactly "mostly vegetarian" as was the case in ancient Japan. Also, the stuff we eat isn't entirely natural. Putting the additive and preservative rich fecal matter into the soil might yield less tha
Real numbers: urine-to-bread conversion analysis (Score:4, Informative)
Here's an analysis we did [richearthinstitute.org] on how many pounds of wheat (and loaves of bread) could be grown using only the fertilizer contained in one person's yearly urine output. This figure didn't make it into the National Geographic article, but it's really important for understanding the potential for urine recycling to replace synthetic fertilizers at a large scale. Of course urine-derived fertilizer could be applied to any other food or non-food crops, but we thought the huge pile of bread was the more accessible measure.
And if you look closely at the numbers, you'll see one of the most surprising things of all: that nearly 90% of the nitrogen (and 2/3 or better of the potassium and phosphorus) in human waste is in the urine!
Abe Noe-Hays, Research Director, Rich Earth Institute [richearthinstitute.org]
Ob.Austin_Powers_misquote (Score:2)
"Basil, this coffee tastes like shit!" ...and this isn't actually that bad... a bit nutty..."
"...it is shit, Austin."
"Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?
Close the nutrient cycle? (Score:2)
Researchers Try To "Close the Nutrient Cycle"
I didn't realise it was open. Have they been shooting my poop into space?
Cary NC already doing this (Score:2, Interesting)
The Town of Cary sells this already.
This facility takes liquid biosolids, a byproduct of the main wastewater treatment processes, from the North and South Cary Water Reclamation Facilities and converts them, using heat, to a dry BB-sized pellet used as fertilizer. These pellets meet strict state and federal guidelines required to achieve a Class A EQ (exceptional quality) rating and provides the Town with the most options for safe reuse or cost effective disposal.
From 2006–2008, this facility treated
It has already been done ...for a while (Score:1)
http://www.milorganite.com/Abo... [milorganite.com]
DNRTFA :)
Oh great... (Score:1)
Terrible idea (Score:1)
Omnivorous solid waste makes bad fertilizer because of all of the protein waste. The energy wasted to refine human waste into fertilizer would be better spent on increasing the population of herbivorous livestock to produce usable solid waste for fertilizer. It would also have the effect of driving down meat prices, which have been on the dramatic rise for quite a while now.
I use one of these... (Score:3)
I use a composting toilet in my house. I use one of These to seperate out my urine. http://www.ecovita.net/privy50... [ecovita.net]
Poo goes into a bucket lined with a compostable bag. I sprinkle coconut coir on it. Urine is sterile (and it's what smells bad) so it goes out a pipe and into a greywater system (basically a french drain in the yard).
It works like a charm. The solids are composted for a year to make sure any nasty bugs that might be in there die, and I put the waste on the roses and not the garden. No Problem.
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Wow, bring back all the crap that use to kill thousands of people a year. Well done on your drive to take us to the dark ages.
Urine is NOT sterile. That myth needs to die in a fire.
There are many disease that can appear through urine, even in health people.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re... [sciencedaily.com]
Untreated solid waste also carries many disease. I"m not sure why you think the magically go away.
A lot of places (Score:2)
already do this.
Tracking (Score:2)
It will of course start out targeting minorities getting any type of public assistance as no one (not nearly enough) will care about their rights and privacies.
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I know you're being facetious, but authorities in some large cities are monitoring illegal drug usage in different neighborhoods by analyzing the sewage coming out of them.
Soylent brown? (Score:1)