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Hardcore Waste Recycling

Posted by michael on from the yep-it's-friday dept.

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."

3 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. spaceship earth by loveandpeace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:still... by Master+Bait · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I think if I was going to re-use my poopoo, I'd get one of those SunMar composting toilets. They're quite sanitary. You shovel your shit out after it stews for 5 years or so.

    Maybe Joseph Jenkins hasn't had any disintery outbreaks in his home, but what if everybody in the neighborhood did the night soil thing? Liver flukes from the cukes, drops from the crops!

    --
    "Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
    --Tom Schulman
  3. My mother and brother nearly died from... by RhettLivingston · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.