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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."'"

12 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 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/...

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      Gently reply
  2. 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.

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

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

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    [Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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?

  7. 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