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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."
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.
prozac potato anyone?
Logic, macros, and more
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?
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.
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.
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