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Hardcore Waste Recycling
erf writes "Ok, recently we've had a story posted on composting,
followed by one on recycling wastewater into snow. Enough with the amateur hour stuff, how about the real thing? Joseph Jenkins has been thermophilically composting all of his family's food waste and sewage into compost for his garden for 24 years. Yes, he eats the food out of that garden too. All you need is a bucket, some sawdust, and a compost bin. You can read all about it in the
Humanure
Handbook. The squeamish might want to begin with the section on fecophobia."
It smells like sewage, it feels like sewage, and it tastes like sewage.
Too bad we didn't step in it.
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Shit -I've been doing that for years
-888 Geek Help (888-433-5435)
fecophobia sounds like a 'safe' description of an album i once heard.
it was called "shitscared"
this goes a long way beyond taking aluminum cans to the recycling center. i noticed he didn't mention much about biogas, a method of turning compost (usually from horses or sheep or cows) into methane and fertilizer. so far, that's my favorite waste-to-energy method, though i can't seem to get the city to let me put a biodigester in the back yard: they seem to be reluctant to have a methane tank hanging out in the middle of the block.
This gives the phrase "eat shit" a whole new meaning ....
I smell Profit!
Only my way involes throwing my dogs poop in the neghibors garden vs. my poop in my garden
What a load.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
But its organic!
so it must be good!
But its natural!
So it must be good!
lol
Logic, macros, and more
I guess you are.
/. Blog is now very unstable.
This
Now what I would like to see is a way to compost or recycle all those computer monitors we've been forced to post about 3 times.
Yeah. That was bad. I think timothy posted it, then Taco posted it, then forgot he postged it and posted it again.
Work sucked, until it became unemployment, when it became slightly more tolerable. -Tet
These guys found a way to recycle thier rotten potatoes into a powersuply for thier server ...
prozac potato anyone?
Logic, macros, and more
if I should die before I wake
all my bones and sinew take
put them in the compost pile
to decompose there for a while
when corn or radishes you munch
you may be having me for lunch
then excrete me with a grin
chortling 'there goes pete again!'
blog-O-rama
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Seeing as how there are lots of scat fans here (I base this on all the posts some of you people make), I bet nobody even bothers to read the fecophobia page.
...I hope the server doesn't start dropping logs.
Sorry, I had to say it...
[curls into a fecal position]
The proper term isn't Humanure, its milorganite.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
that's it buddy, you show that turd who's boss.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
If you're grabbing human manure from Haitian orphans, you've got bigger issues than some possible pathogens...
--------
Then it probably wouldn't be a good idea to tell everyone how their waste is usually dropped into a local stream/river where you get your water supply. Honestly, it's going to get back to you one way or another :)
Karma Clown
I believe the guy regarding the extinction of pathogens in the poop - it seems well-studied. But what about biomagnification of the various contaminants we've eaten - pesticides, pthalates and such from plastic containers, simple inorganics that are always present in trace amounts. If you recirculate the same base organic medium through your veggie garden over and over, will these not build up to (literally) stupefying levels?
Who modded me Flamebate? I'm so sick of asshole moderators, A: its funny, B: It's a homestarrunner.com reference!
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
this has been going on now for quite some time. Ever since humans realized that their own manure worked just as well as their animals. What do you think all those homesteaders with no plumbing do with their shit :)
For more info on this look at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech/orgfarm/homeste ading/
this is not a sig.
in eastern countries.
James joyce did it with Dublin.
Humanure...it's what's for dinner!
Humanure...the other brown meat!
Humanure...bet you can't have just one
Humanure....bet cha' bite a turd
Where's the humanure?
Throw another Humanure on the barbie
Humanure...come on down!
Heeeeereeee's...Humanure!
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
My dad uses cow/chicken manuer(sp?) to fertilize his garden soil and let me tell you, those veggies SPROUT!
My mother bitches all day from the smell when he puts it in the soil LOL
With this, you can take your shit and eat it too!
Our friend named Ted "The un[i|a]bomber" "K" fertilized his veggies with his own shiat, and look how he turned out ;)
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I thought it was hillarious.
Recycling human manure is not exactly cutting edge technology. In fact, there's actually a fascinating book that covers the subject, among others, called Farmers of Forty Centuries that goes into lots of detail on the Chinese agricultural system that worked so brilliantly for so long.
man, i thought it was hilarious. somebody just doesnt get it. eh well.. at least i got modded up for interesting! (see post right below yours)
I think I speak for the majority of the slashdot geek audience when I say...WTF?!
Lisa: You do Yoga? ... I started an organic compost pile at home. ... we *might* have an opening at the poser level.
Jesse: Yeah, but I started *before* it was cool.
Lisa: My name's Lisa Simpson. I think your protest was incredibly brave.
Jesse: Thank you. This planet needs every friend it can get.
Lisa: Oh, the earth is the best! That's why I'm a vegetarian.
Jesse: Heh. Well, that's a start.
Lisa: Uh, well, I was thinking of going vegan.
Jesse: [chuckles] I'm a level 5 vegan -- I won't eat anything that casts a shadow.
Lisa: Wow. Um
Jesse: Only at home? You mean you don't pocket-mulch? [takes out pocket stuff for Lisa to feel]
Lisa: Oh, it's so decomposed! Do you think I could join Dirt First?
Jesse: Well
Lisa: Oh, thank you, thank you!
Did you even read the full title before you tried to whore some karma? its stated in the article...if you read it, its not a repost, it ties in, and even gave a nice link to the article you posted in the original.
Nearly everything he ever wrote ( Like If I Had a Hammer) has been attributed to Pete in the public mind, while he himself remains largely unknown.
As a point of interest when Lee died he was cremated and his ashes were, indeed, scattered on his compost heap.
There is also a cowboy reincarnation joke I learned from Utah Phillips. I won't go over the whole thing, but the punchline involves another cowboy looking at a "meadow muffin" and saying, "Nope, you ain't changed a bit."
KFG
in the past my father had setup a system for recycling the bath/shower water for flushing the toilet.
He used a large, old water heater as a storage tank, the water from the tub would go straight to the tank. When the toilet was flushed a pump would bring it to the toilet. It saved so much water that the water co. changed the meter on the house 3 or 4 times before they gave up...
There were several draw backs though... If not enough showers were taken (or conversely, too many toilet flushes) the tank would empty and get to the bottom "sludge" which was an orangish nasty that consisted of soap scum. This meant that if the tank was empty, the water would have to run for quite a while to fill the tank again. The toilet needed to be cleaned more often due to the soap scum. We had a nasty green toilet from the 70s at the time so it was harder to notice. The pump broke down once and needed to be replaced. It was a small price to pay for all the money we saved over the years.
Composting, shmomposting. Saving water is the way to keep more money to yourself.
We have war to worry about, losing our jobs to worry about, getting a job to worry about, and many other things where as much as I feel like a heartless bastard, I just don't care about how much trash I leave in a landfill somewhere I can't see it.
Out of sight and out of mind, we're all going to continue to use plastic and styrofoam, buy fast food, and dump god only knows what down the drains. As much as "every little bit counts" how much can you expect? I mean
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
This is a great idea! Hey what is DIRT after all? IT'S DEAD DECOMPOSED ORGANIC MATTER! And thats where food grows. Brown gold. Anyway why is human shit worse than, say, horse shit? or cow shit? or chicken shit? or BAT shit? All make GREAT fertalizer!
The REAL problem with using human waste as fertalizer is that MOST people don't just put thier shit down their sewer, they also put down lots of soap, bleach, and all the other nasties. By the time sewage gets to the treatment plant it's usually so chock full of heavy metals and toxic chemicals that there is nothing else to do with it except dump it into a major body of water and pray that dilution is the solution.
If you keep your piss'n'shit seperate from all the other stuff that usually goes down the drain, then all you have to do is let it set up for a while. Let it break down, an let the e-coli die. Then you're all set. Again, it's the exact same thing they do with cow shit. They dump it all in a big tank, let it sit for a while and digest, and then they spread it all over the fields that are used to grow your food.
So in summation
1. Food loves to grow in dirt.
2. Dirt is shit.
3. Human shit is no worse than x shit, where x is a vertibret life form.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
My guess is things like this are meant for people who want to be self-sufficient. Do you want to be self-sufficient? If not, maybe best to move on to a different duplicate story.
"You eat pieces of poop for breakfast?"
Blah.
eating mushrooms that had been grown in night soil in China and then illegally imported. Over 200 faculty and students at Mississippi State University were hospitalized with severe food poisoning after consuming mushrooms at a salad bar. The government covered it up as less than 50 to try to minimize it, but the hospital records in the area tell a different story.
Night soil isn't used in this country because it isn't safe to use it. Any process that could cleanse human waste of all viral DNA would also cleanse it of all but the simplest nutrients and make it less valuable as night soil. Its not that it hasn't been tried. The problem has been and is still being extensively researched in this country.
The basic problem is that far, far more diseases can be passed from human to human than from any other animal to human. It is interesting that many of the societies with practices like these are also the breeding grounds for most of the new disease strains we are attacked by. Perhaps its not all because their citizens are treated like dispensable cattle. Or perhaps it is and like cattle, they're fed the products of their own waste.
meat breeds maggots, and maggots arent good for composting. yard waste (grass/leaves) or vegetable matter is best for compost.
and you dont need any special compost "bin". all you need is a heap. or some pallates formed into a box, perfect for airation and water drainage, plus the boxes decompose after a couple years so theres no plastic thing to deal with.
sewage compost? heh, sure if you dont have neighboors and dont mind your yard smelling like shit. plus that breeds all kinds of diseases, thats why people dont drink the water they shit in, or when they did we had a fucking plague.
"Eat S#!t!"
;P
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
unless he is in the middle of nowhere and does not want tho costs of waste disposal. I mean, the disposal of human waste in cities is very good, it gets filtered out and produces water and pure waste that is then turned into furtilizer.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
What about prions? They're well known for their relatively high resistance to normal inactivation methods used to sterilize against typical microbial pathogens (e.g. irradiation, boiling, dry heat, treatment with acids or proteases). It's been shown that an infected rat brain needs to be autoclaved at 132 degrees C for 4.5 hours to be sterlized. I don't think your typical composter will do that. Neither will these things 'die' if you leave them out there long enough - for the simple fact that they're not living organisms - they're just sterically modified isoforms of regularly expressed human proteins. Of course, transmissible spongiform encephalopathies are pretty rare - and indeed, it isn't even certain how much risk humans are at from mad cow disease. But if your composting material is infected with scrapie-form prions, then, well, I'd be a bit concerned. Particularly in light of BSE: what if it's passed on from the cow to its feces, which is then used as composting manure?
I found it in one of Alex Wade's classic post and beam/energy efficient house books.
The idea was old even then, ancient in fact. The toilet works better with humus ( that's the topsoil type of humus, not the mashed up chickpea sort of humus, although I know there are people who claim there's no essential difference) than with sawdust. The humus both represses odors better and contains living bacteria to go right to work breaking down the fecal matter.
Of course doing anything like this and using it for compost in the garden is very dependant on proper composting technique. A *proper* compost pile gets quite hot naturally. You'll never see a compost pile properly maintained covered with snow, but you *will* see steam coming off of it in cold, wet weather.
If you're a bit squeamish about these things the obvious answer is to use your human waste compost to fertilize non fruit bearing trees and other ornamental plants.
One of the other uses of this sort of toilet is that it's the safest, cheapest and most effective self contained marine toilet I've ever seen. No valves to fail. No expensive fixtures. No song and dance just to use and no through hull fittings. It's the old "cedar bucket" taken to the logical and extreme development.
KFG
No Screenshots?!?!?!
And if I did have prions in my waste, would that mean I had shit for brains?
(prions are typically found in the central nervous system)
Dude, you really don't get it do you? That is exactly the attitude that's fucked up this world, and you seem to be pretty ok about it. Sounds like kiddo needs a reality check - your "hippy commie teacher" probably knows more about it than you do.
You're too worried about a war you can't see (except on TV) to do bother looking after your local environment? Way to shit in your own nest fella (pun intended). How about "Think global, act local"?
I'm not sure who the "we" you're referring to is - maybe angsty teenagers?, but there's a large chunk of 20-30 somethings who don't think your way. We recycle (just like putting out the garbage for collection, except it's recycling). We give a shit about the next generation and the water they'll drink and air they'll breath. We put quality of life above quantity of money. It's people like us who will be the reason your grand-kids will be able to go to the beach or the country and not die from the chemicals leaching from a landfill or outlet pipe.
You shouldn't find it hard getting a job. There's probably lots of petrochemical companies that would love an employee like you...
Maybe the "consumers" need their garbage broadcast on national TV, just so they know it's real? It might go well with an hourly de-forestation report...
In Guelph, ON the city takes care of composting.
You sort your garbage into 3 bags:
blue - paper, glass, plastic, cans
green - compostable stuff.
clear - other (landfill stuf)
It's a bit of pain in the ass but I think it's worth it.
-- ZeroZenith
www.slooshdot.org gives us high qvality artikels like ze one about ze human feces.
Zis artikel tells me zat I should be eating lots of karrots to make vechitables grow in ze garten
Ve kan make a difference too! join me, slooshdot
eat karrots
And you are such a fucking coward. Blow me.
my ex stepmom tried to compost (just our food waste/trash - no human waste) when we lived in Rochester. she was too cheap/lazy/dumb to buy a container designed for the process, and instead made a large pile in the corner of our small, chain link fence surrounded back yard.
as a result, rats found their way into our backyard and had a feast, and the neighbors reported us to the city, which then fined us and gave us X amount of time to fix the problem or some largely penatly would come about.
I was abolutely mortified and furious with her. she still didn't want to do anything about it, and for some reason failed to see how the rats and our "compost heap" were in anyway related.
that same batshit crazy woman thought she could teleport based on the electron tunneling theory, as well as turn objects into other objects (a bench into a banana), and of course she also felt she was psychic. she felt that she was evolving at a rate faster than the rest of us and was the bleeding edge of what human kind would become.
I on the other hand felt that she was totally insane and I feared her.
I'm very glad that she never saw this article, or she for sure would have tried to somehow follow it, but with slight variations that would have made the world of difference and embarrassed me even more so in my high school years.
I have no idea where that woman is now, but I hope she has since saught help.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
would call them mode #0 and mode #1
:-P
but then other sane folks who came into the room might press the wrong one
more like the pooptomizer.
"No, no they don't."
Soylent Green! The early formula...
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
A Prion is a protein (read : cellular machinery) are found almost exclusively in nervous tissue. It seems to be a protein (read : cellular machinery) That's why we get all the cool prion diseases by cannibalism of nervous tissue (cows eating cows -BSE, people eating people -KURU, and transplantation -CJD). It's true it hard as hell to destroy but its even harder to get. Prion diseases spread (or so they think -my studies are a couple years old and biology moves faster then the tech world) when one such protein in a beta configuration bounces into a protein in alpha configuration. These collisions are unlikely but obviously exponential. Alpha prions are present in all mammals and do no harm (not sure exactly what they do do [ha -more poop] as mice genetically engineered without apha prions seem just fine) while Beta prions turn you in to a driveling madman with actual large holes in your brain.
Not sure where the beta configuration comes from in the first place -maybe random -but one could imagine that given exponential growth with very low transmissibility then one would need several lifetimes (as in recycling nervous tissue) to develop the disease. CJD has a genetic component -maybe those people make beta prions right from the start but then take 50 years to show.
So the only way you can get it from poop is if there is lots of neural tissue in your shit -which is gross just to think about. Plus then your main exposure would be whatever stewed meat you had in the first place. (Indecently the reason why the Brits outlawed the beef on the bone is case there is more nervous tissue by the bone then a hunk of pure meat where there is almost none -oh and don't let hamburger fool you -they grind everything up to put in hamburger)
Don't take this as the word of God (as I usually like to be taken) It's been a tny bit since I got interested and I didn't pause to check my facts. Mostly a good jumping off point if you are casually interested.
-888 Geek Help (888-433-5435)
You didn't even get any funny mods: 50% flamebait, 50% off-topic, 0% funny.
Moderators! Can't live with 'em...can pretty much do without them.
There's just no accounting for tastes, I guess.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
Sorry for the double speak -my spelling is so poor I have to spellcheck everything -copy and paste error
Double ungood
-888 Geek Help (888-433-5435)
Pot Luck Dinner!
Seriously, imagine the looks on everyone's face if this guy showed up at a potluck dinner. He would probably be the only one "immune" to the effects of his dish.
-- Len
Processed human waste is actually used as fertilizer. Googling for biosolids turns up plenty of links. For example:
Is Human Waste safe as fertilizer?
Wastewater sludge to biosolids fertilizer
Alot of it also depends on the source of the humanure. If you and your family are providing most of it, and you're generally healthy, then you should be OK. But large scale collection for application to commercial agriculture is probably a bad idea.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Are there any municipal level composting
facilities for human waste?
The article talks about single composting
toilets. Are there any systems to handle
multiple toilets (neighborhood, or community)
that 'do it right' and get decent, safe
fertelizer?
Cleara
My mother bought this book and ever since the clerk at the bookstore has been avoiding her. It's sort of funny.
I'd have to agree that for marine systems composting is a pretty good idea if you are going to port and unload it frequently. If not it could add quite a bit of weight over the 'pissing over the rail' approach. I'd also be careful how you placed a long-term system. It does generate heat and depending on how well your composting system is designed you might not want it near things that explode when they get warm.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I think this guy's a genius.
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
Subsistance farmers do this all the time.
Hey, the Koreans have been doing this for decades.
> Enough with the amateur hour stuff, how about
> the real thing?
Ok. Take a look at http://www.ansci.umn.edu/dairy/dinews/composting.
> Yes, he eats the food out of that garden too.
Why not? You can't get a disease from yourself.
> The squeamish might want to begin with the
> section on fecophobia.
Not a problem. I'm a farmer.
Did you know that it was once a common practice to hang the outhouse out over the pigpen? (We don't do that anymore.)
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The results of this google search strongly suggest that there is e. coli in cow manure. Those of you who get news from Canada may remember Walkerton, where a few people died from drinking water contanimated, it was said, by runoff from farms.
Steps have to be taken to prevent the spread of disease in manure regardless of the animal producing it, and I think you'll find if you read the linked-to story that these steps are covered.
this guy knows his shit
That is gross, so the guy shits in his garden and eats out of it? Yuck!!!!!
If you have every passed a Korean rice paddy or vegetable garden in the spring, you will have no doubt where they emptied the winter's "honey buckets". Asia has been doing for millenia what Thomas Jefferson discovered just over 200 years ago. And, IMHO, I never ate better strawberries, squash, corn, etc. Western stomachs beware! Wash your veggies well!! There is a special soap for it. In fact, the grocery stores used to sell a soap with plates, glasses, and vegetables on the label!
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
i currently volunteer at an inner-city organic farm in brisbane australia. we are looking into composting human manure on our site and this looks to be a very valuable reference
following a link to the publisher's page i discovered that not only is the full text of the book offered freely online, but also the publisher provides complete dead-treee copies free of charge to non-profit organisations anywhere in the world
to my mind this is an extraordinary example of philanthropy and ecological activism
we will be ordering a couple of books and paying for them (as we have the means) but i would still like to thank the authour and publisher for their work and generosity
...only terrorists will have methane tanks.
*budump.... tish*
Send lawyers, guns, and money!