Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Researchers Try To "Close the Nutrient Cycle" Through Better Waste Recycling

Posted by samzenpus on from the using-everything dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Converting human waste into usable fertilizer may become the next important development in sustainable living. 'Most conventional farms invest in synthetic fertilizer, which requires energy to produce and is associated with many environmental problems of its own. But by separating out human urine before it gets to the wastewater plant, Rich Earth cofounder Kim Nace says they can turn it into a robust fertilizer alternative: a "local, accessible, free, sanitary source of nitrogen and phosphorous."'"

32 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. Night Soil by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 5, Informative

    I believe "nightsoil men" used to sell the human waste they carried away to tanners and farmers. In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one. The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon.

    --
    May the Maths Be with you!
    1. Re:Night Soil by Savage-Rabbit · · Score: 5, Informative

      I believe "nightsoil men" used to sell the human waste they carried away to tanners and farmers. In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one. The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon.

      Not entirely but the extent to which we fail to recycle human excrement and urine is quite new. Many ancient societies used human waste for fertiliser although that can be a health hazard. In Roman times tanners, people who dyed cloth and other such businesses actually had pissoires outside their shops and big signs inviting customers to please come over and relieve themselves. Apparently tanners and dyers processed the urine to get Ammonia rich solutions which they used to prepare their products. I remember a QI episode where Stephen Fry dropped this fact-bit about how the House of Lords in London used to reek of stale piss on rainy days because of the quantities of urine used to in the production of tweed fabric which was popular with the upper classes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

      --
      Only to idiots, are orders laws.
      -- Henning von Tresckow
    2. Re:Night Soil by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Informative

      The night soil was untreated, though, and therefore extremely dangerous for public health. Also, they were dealing with feces, and urine is less dangerous even when untreated.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    3. Re:Night Soil by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon." I can tell you, from a wonderful tour of the Stickney sewage treatment plant outside of Chicago, that in the 70's the solid-waste output was determined to be too contaminated with cadmium to be safe for human food crops. Cadmium comes from the blue dye in jeans, which is washed away in the laundry.

      Nowdays, as a poster below has pointed out, pharma and it's metabolites will probably be the challenge.

    4. Re:Night Soil by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Interesting
      >quote>Nowdays, as a poster below has pointed out, pharma and it's metabolites will probably be the challenge.

      That's quite a different problem. Cadmium is an element. Pharmaceuticals and their metabolic products are organic, and consist of the same elements as the desired stuff. Unlike cadmium, you can often get rid of them simply by applying high-enough temperatures.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    5. Re:Night Soil by ebno-10db · · Score: 2

      Apparently tanners and dyers processed the urine to get Ammonia rich solutions which they used to prepare their products.

      Urine was also widely used for cleaning (in the Middle Ages that I know of, and probably other times). It's not surprising, when you consider that ammonia is used for cleaning today. Methinks an important step was to thoroughly rinse things after cleaning.

    6. Re:Night Soil by retroworks · · Score: 5, Informative

      The nightsoilmen (toshers) processes, while imperfect, were much less toxic than what they were replaced by - Whitehead's flush toilet (which drove them out of business). The outflow from flush toilets in London were directed into the same dry pits as the toshers worked from, making the pits impossible to manage. With no downstream plan for the new flush toilet technology, "The Great Stink of London" came from the stormwater runoff into the Thames, which caused thousands of death in cholera epidemics.

      You are right, the work should not perhaps be romanticized, but was not given any incentive to improve... it was flushed away by the new million dollar flushable toilet technology industry. The fact is that the toshers/nightsoil industry created better than average pay in London, certainly much better than blackleg coal mining. But the marketers of "flush toilet technology" stigmatized them, and the sewage treatment plants of today are seen by many in the environmental community as a "correction" to a technological advance. http://retroworks.blogspot.com...

      During the mid 1800s another "technological advance" was the sale of mercury as a laxative. I guess it gives great bowel movements (Lewis and Clark's expedition can be tracked today by the mercury laxative residue - they ate a lot of elk and not much fiber). What I find fascinating are the parallels between the toshers and the past decade of private sector electronic waste management. Most of the "export market" buyers of used CRTs turned out to be not primitive wire burners but factories formerly licensed by Proview, BenQ, Wistron, Foxconn etc., which were purchasing very specific models of CRT for refurbishment and sale to markets like Cairo, Lagos, Jakarta and New Dehli. Like the nightsoil workers, they were flooded with product and then denigrated as "primitive recycling". The CRTs were diverted to a shredding industry designed for scrap metal. Leaded glass cullet doesn't shred well, and the glass diverted from reuse private markets still lies around. At one of the largest sites, in Hallstead PA, floodwaters engulfed the CRT cullet piles twice in the past decade, leading to the closure of the recycling facility last summer. http://resource-recycling.com/...

      --
      Gently reply
    7. Re:Night Soil by necro81 · · Score: 2

      The key difference in this day and age is that the input and output streams are no longer co-located. Back when 85% of people were farmers or otherwise associated with agriculture, and only a small percentage of people lived in urban areas, getting the waste back to the fields was trivial. Now, with few people on farms and the majority of people living in cities, there can be huge geographic distances between where resources are consumed (the fields) and where they are disposed of (sewage treatment plants). Getting these reconnected will not be quick or easy. But getting concentrated nutrients from sewage waste will certainly help. Trainloads of field-ready fertilizer leaving cities - just as trains and trucks of grain, meat, and produce come in - would go a long way to restoring balance.

    8. Re:Night Soil by rahvin112 · · Score: 2

      I large cities with unknown pathogens throughout using human waste on ANY product that humans will eat is a recipe for a massive health epidemic. Pathogens such as hepatitis can survive the treatment process and remain live in the compost. This doesn't even take into account all the other stuff that's in the waste stream, from the soap you used in the shower to the drano you poured down the sink to clear it. Wastewater is dangerous stuff, it should be properly treated and then processed into very fertilizer (at least in my area it's highly expensive) that's sold to parks and farms that grow products not for human consumption.

  2. We flush more by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The amount of drugs and toxic things we flush are more of a problem than simply reformulating urine.

    1. Re:We flush more by cusco · · Score: 2

      Viagra and several antidepressants are now at high enough levels where they can be detected in rivers downstream from sewage treatment plants.

      --
      "Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
  3. The chemistry works out... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I wonder what they plan to do about all the neat stuff that we excrete through the kidneys? Stock urine is harmless enough, if distasteful; but the list of drugs and other interesting substances that are either directly excreted, or have metabolites that are, isn't a short one. Probably not something you'd want bioaccumulating...

    1. Re:The chemistry works out... by mellon · · Score: 5, Informative

      From the FAQ:

      What about pharmaceutical residues in the urine? When we take prescription or over-the-counter drugs, a portion of the dose passes through us unchanged and is excreted in our urine. When we use flush toilets that are connected to sewers, these residual drugs pass largely unchanged through the treatment plant in about twenty-four hours and then go directly into rivers, lakes, or the ocean, where they can harm sensitive aquatic life and end up in our drinking water. If we spread the urine on agricultural land instead, the robust soil ecosystem has a chance to break down the drugs and biodegrade them over a much longer period of time, greatly reducing or eliminating their levels before they ever reach a body of water. In this way, soil application is a great improvement over current practice. On the other hand, plants have the ability to absorb some pharmeceuticals, which could potentially affect people eating crops grown with urine. We plan to investigate pharmaceutical levels in crop plants and, if necessary, test methods of removing pharmaceuticals from urine before using it as a fertilizer.

    2. Re:The chemistry works out... by damaki · · Score: 2

      That is funny, because it is already known to be a problem for reprocessed water.
      Let's do the same for what we eat, and let's make the humanity sterile, those endocrine thingies only affect pussies.

      --
      Stupidity is the root of all evil.
    3. Re:The chemistry works out... by Noe-Hays · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Abe Noe-Hays here--Research Director at the Rich Earth Institute. One thing I should add is that starting this spring we are participating in a two-year study (headed by the University of Michigan) measuring the levels of pharmaceuticals in urine collected from public toilets, and tracking the movement of those pharmaceuticals into soil, groundwater, and plant tissues. The soil ecosystem is very good at breaking down complex compounds, but some drugs are considerably more resistant to decomposition than others and we are interested to see how they behave. If you want to follow our progress, please sign up for our newsletter! Thanks, mellon, for quoting our FAQ into the conversation.

  4. Re:recycling programs by mellon · · Score: 2

    Yours doesn't? Why does your town hate mother earth?

  5. Re:Ick is right by SirGarlon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not just illegal drugs, either. Antidepressants have been found in urban drinking water supplies.

    --
    [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
  6. Re:New Meaning to the phrase: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A colleague of mine works on phopshorus (P) removal from waste water treatment plants. In his presentations he always talks about the P lost down the toilet, how much that costs to treat and how much could be made recovering it and selling it for fertilizer, and then throws out the phrase "there's a gold mine of P in there". The crowd never seems to know how to take that.

  7. Re:New Meaning to the phrase: by Mystakaphoros · · Score: 2

    Make it rain, baby.

  8. Is It Safe? by rsmith-mac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Since epidemiology is well outside my area of expertise, I have to ask: would this be safe?

    With artificial fertilizers we don't have to be concerned about the purity of the material, whereas if we were to use natural fertilizers (animal or otherwise) it introduces all of the impurities and other undesirable byproducts that come with waste. And if we're talking about human waste in particular, does that mean this would create a new cycle for pathogens? Or is there a way to process waste to remove pathogens?

    1. Re:Is It Safe? by RedBear · · Score: 3, Informative

      Since epidemiology is well outside my area of expertise, I have to ask: would this be safe?

      With artificial fertilizers we don't have to be concerned about the purity of the material, whereas if we were to use natural fertilizers (animal or otherwise) it introduces all of the impurities and other undesirable byproducts that come with waste. And if we're talking about human waste in particular, does that mean this would create a new cycle for pathogens? Or is there a way to process waste to remove pathogens?

      Having recently become much more educated than I used to be on this subject, I now find it hilarious (and a bit frightening) how disconnected modern society has become from good old Mother Nature. If you'll stop and think a moment you'll realize that we live on the surface of a planet where quadrillions of living organisms have been living, dying, urinating and defecating for billions of years, and until a veritable blink-of-an-eye ago there were no "waste treatment facilities" anywhere to be found. The very fact that our civilization requires artificial "waste treatment facilities" in order to survive is a symptom of just how totally disconnected we are from the natural cycles of life. Every living thing that has ever existed here for billions of years has lived by recycling nutrients from the bodily decay or waste products of other living things.

      So, asking "if there is a way" to process waste to remove pathogens is a question that should answer itself now that we are all in the correct mindset. The answer of course is that nature _is_ a gigantic and unbelievably effective and efficient waste reprocessing facility. Step out of the door of your artificial housing construct and walk to any nearby location where you might be able to grow a plant and look down. That stuff underneath your feet is called "dirt". It's composed of minerals extracted from the air by plants, leeched out of rocks by water, and more rock bits ground up by glaciers. But most importantly it's composed of lots of chemicals and compounds that either used to be part of the body of some animal or plant, or was a waste product of a living organism. If dirt, the infinitely reprocessed waste product of billions of previous excreting organisms, was going to hurt us we'd already all be long dead.

      The bacteria and other organisms that live in dirt evolved to live on the kinds of things we refer to as "waste". They reprocess it into yummy fertilized soil that plants love to grow in, and in the process kill off all the things we call "pathogens" that evolved to live inside us and are excreted in our waste. The worms and soil bacteria and the eventual heat of the full composting process creates a perfectly safe fertilizer from any kind of animal "manure", including human. They even have a name for the manure that comes from us: Humanure.

      Using this purifying ability of nature, we can even make cheap and highly effective water filters that work by letting the soil bacteria in a column of sand kill off the "pathogens" in contaminated water as it trickles through the filter. The soil bacteria just gobbles up and destroys everything that we would refer to as a pathogen. Chemical toxins of course are a different matter. Many of those are unnatural to the environment and have to be dealt with in other ways, unfortunately. But animal waste? No problem. Nature takes care of that quite easily.

      Now, the issue of urine separation turns out to be interesting for multiple reasons. Using urine separating toilets not only makes it immensely easier to separately process and use the urine for fertilizer, it also allows one to have a composting toilet that doesn't smell bad and holds a surprising amount of waste before it needs to be emptied. Apparently that horrible latrine, RV/boat holding tank smell is caused not by the solid waste itself but by mixing the urine and solids. Separating the urine and throwing a layer of something organic like peat moss

  9. Re:Ick is right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Your bottled water is tap water run through a charcoal filter. So, you are drinking tap water everyday.

  10. Re:Night Soil and beyond by ebno-10db · · Score: 4, Interesting

    To the countries listed in your first link, I'd add Korea. My father was there in the late 1940's with the US Army, and he said human waste was widely used as fertilizer (Korea was a very different place back then). The army even offered their waste to the locals (an offer genuinely meant to be helpful), but the farmers said that Americans used too much toilet paper.

    Re your 2nd link, it's interesting that even in 1909 there were Americans who were interested in how there are parts of East Asia where the same fields have been used for millennia, and are quite productive.

    Obviously using raw human waste is a major health problem, but processed stuff works great. The National Geographic article mentions urine in specific, apparently because it takes less energy and effort to separate out the useful stuff. It surprises me that it "contains 80 percent of the nitrogen and 55 percent of the phosphorous", because I usually think of manure being used for fertilizer. Does the animal urine go to waste, or is it used by, for example, having livestock graze in fallow fields?

  11. Re:Ick is right by dunkelfalke · · Score: 2

    I always trink tap water at home. Seems that the antidepressants in the urban drinking water are only in homeopathic quantities, because I am still a very unhappy person altogether.

    --
    "It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
  12. Modern Day Equivalent by TWX · · Score: 3, Funny

    I believe "nightsoil men" used to sell the human waste they carried away to tanners and farmers. In any case, the idea of using human waste as fertiliser is very a very old one. The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon.

    In efforts to expand our recycling program:

    • Compostable yard waste goes into the beige bin.
    • Clean, recycled paper goes into the blue bin.
    • Clean glass goes into the green bin.
    • Aluminum cans and metal products go into the orange bin.
    • Human and animal feces go into the brown bin.
    • Human and animal urine go into the yellow bin.
    • Medical waste, bandages, and used feminine hygiene products go into the red bin.

    Thank you for your mandatory participation in our municipal recycling program.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
  13. Real numbers: urine-to-bread conversion analysis by Noe-Hays · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's an analysis we did on how many pounds of wheat (and loaves of bread) could be grown using only the fertilizer contained in one person's yearly urine output. This figure didn't make it into the National Geographic article, but it's really important for understanding the potential for urine recycling to replace synthetic fertilizers at a large scale. Of course urine-derived fertilizer could be applied to any other food or non-food crops, but we thought the huge pile of bread was the more accessible measure.

    And if you look closely at the numbers, you'll see one of the most surprising things of all: that nearly 90% of the nitrogen (and 2/3 or better of the potassium and phosphorus) in human waste is in the urine!

    Abe Noe-Hays, Research Director, Rich Earth Institute

  14. Cary NC already doing this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Town of Cary sells this already.

    This facility takes liquid biosolids, a byproduct of the main wastewater treatment processes, from the North and South Cary Water Reclamation Facilities and converts them, using heat, to a dry BB-sized pellet used as fertilizer. These pellets meet strict state and federal guidelines required to achieve a Class A EQ (exceptional quality) rating and provides the Town with the most options for safe reuse or cost effective disposal.

    From 2006–2008, this facility treated an average of 28 million gallons of biosolids per year and produced an average of 3,100 tons of pellets per year for the agricultural market. The waste generated by a typical family in a year is about 100 pounds of fertilizer.

    The Town of Cary markets its round fertilizer pellets under the name Cary Enviro Gems.

    http://www.townofcary.org/Departments/utilities/wastewatertreatment/Biosolids_Dryer.htm

  15. Re:Ick is right by operagost · · Score: 2

    Reverse osmosis is not running it "through a charcoal filter". If you look at bottled water that is taken from a municipal supply, it's always been through reverse osmosis and had a tiny amount of salt added to it so that it's not totally tasteless. Of course, better bottled water comes from springs, and that information is also on the label.

    --

    Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
  16. Re:New Meaning to the phrase: by Forbo · · Score: 3, Funny

    Chocolate rain...
    Some stay dry, others feel the pain.

  17. I use one of these... by whistlingtony · · Score: 2

    I use a composting toilet in my house. I use one of These to seperate out my urine. http://www.ecovita.net/privy50...

    Poo goes into a bucket lined with a compostable bag. I sprinkle coconut coir on it. Urine is sterile (and it's what smells bad) so it goes out a pipe and into a greywater system (basically a french drain in the yard).

    It works like a charm. The solids are composted for a year to make sure any nasty bugs that might be in there die, and I put the waste on the roses and not the garden. No Problem.

    1. Re:I use one of these... by geekoid · · Score: 2

      Wow, bring back all the crap that use to kill thousands of people a year. Well done on your drive to take us to the dark ages.

      Urine is NOT sterile. That myth needs to die in a fire.
      There are many disease that can appear through urine, even in health people.
      http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...

      Untreated solid waste also carries many disease. I"m not sure why you think the magically go away.

      --
      The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  18. Re:New Meaning to the phrase: by jellomizer · · Score: 2

    What do you think "Organic" food is grown from?

    Manure has been a source for fertilizers for many centuries.

    Human waste has the issues is the fact that Humans are a dirty animal, and our germs that makes us sick, will spread to make other people sick.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.