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."

Comments

Re:still...

[C21]

And I am also somewhat concerned about whether or not some of the chemicals we ingest medicinally and otherwise could pose a health hazard. or it might be fun. prozac potato anyone?

This is a very far fetched idea. First of all, when we ingest a chemical into our bodies our digestive tract, blood stream, and finally brain breaks the chemical down into more base constituents, think 4 or 5 at least. However, some bit of the chemical usually passes through unchanged. Here comes the far fetched part, your plant you would have to be growing would have to want to use that chemical as it recognizes it as a vitamen/nutrient. *If* this happened, then the plant itself would break down the drug to an indecipherable state, otherwise all you'd have is some dirt with bits of broken down prozac in it...

Re:Not bad at all, very good in fact!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

In fact this is exactly what people in rural or semirural areas who have septic fields have to do. My parents' house has a septic field, for instance, and you have to be very careful what you flush (and avoid some types of toilet paper). I recently cleared a patch of land halfway down their backyard at the bottom of the field, and there's a distinct methane smell there when the ground is broken. I'm planning on growing some potatoes and such (after the opium poppies ;) so I guess I'm pursuing the same course as the guy who wrote this book - and so are lots of other people, because septic fields and vegetable patches are a very common combo.

Re:recycling bath water for toilet flushing.

[garcia]

a toilet from 1973 probably did more than 8 gallons a flush. Three people during the day, using the bathroom 5 times a day, that's 120 gallons, which is 3600 gallons a month (on average).

Prions

[stendec]

pathogens only have a limited viability outside the human body, and given enough time, will die even in low-temperature compost.

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?

Re:Not bad at all, very good in fact!

[QAChris]

DIRT may or may not contain organic matter, but dirt is not organic, it is mineral.

Human shit as well as cat shit and dog shit contain numerous microorganisms which are potentially dangerous to humans. E. Coli is only one of many. To kill these microorganisms, the compost must reach temperatures over 160 Deg F and stay there for an extended period of time.

Sewage is not generally dumped directly in large bodies of water, it first passes through SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANTS (AKA Wastewater Treatment Facilities) where much of the nastiness is removed. The problem is disposing of the Stuff that was removed. The options being incineration, landfill, and composting. Just don't put that compost on veggies!

Here the city takes care of composting.

[ZeroZenith]

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.

Re:Biomagnification

[Dyolf Knip]

On top of that, if food grown from your own compost comprises a significant portion of your diet, then the quantity of artificial compounds being ingested decreases dramatically. A snake that eats its own tail doesn't exactly need to worry about preservatives, right? Food poisoning and blood loss, maybe...

No prions in poo

[888 Geek Help]

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.

kudos to the authour and publisher

[solferino]

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