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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
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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.
I smell Profit!
Only my way involes throwing my dogs poop in the neghibors garden vs. my poop in my garden
But its organic!
so it must be good!
But its natural!
So it must be good!
lol
Logic, macros, and more
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.
...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?
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.
With this, you can take your shit and eat it too!
Actually, I have a whole new respect for the goatse fellow now. That guy could probably feed an army.
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.
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!
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
"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.
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?!?!?!
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
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.
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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
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