This column is about composting human waste. While the more sensible reader might be tempted to respond by disregarding the following 750 words as juvenile potty humor, let me assure you, I aim to prove that composting human waste is not a totally insane idea, and furthermore, it’s an idea we cannot afford to simply laugh about.
The most obvious reason to compost toilet waste is primarily that we often already do, in one way or another. Some organic gardeners and environmentalists characterize this argument by saying “compost (like shit) happens.” The argument for this makes sense both before and after industrialization. Quite simply, over millions of years, nature has developed an elegant, effective and inevitable way of dealing with human and animal waste. During this process, the material is rid of human pathogens and contaminants, and returned to the environment in a highly fertile form of topsoil.
This brilliant efficiency is hardly the product of human industry, which can merely emulate it or speed it up. In the past, highly industrialized sewage treatment has inspired humanity to try to develop its own solution to the excrement “problem.” But these attempts at solutions often demonstrate a complete ignorance of the remedy that has existed through nature for a very long time.
Most sewage treatment in industrialized countries is focused on separating water from “sludge,” or, essentially, concentrated waste matter. The sludge is subsequently dealt with in a number of ways and is sometimes composted, but the most common methods involve purifying the sludge as much as possible and then, ultimately, landfilling it. While landfilling is essentially crude composting, it seems like an incredible waste to pack away potentially high-fertility topsoil among broken big screen TVs and plastic umbrellas, only to be contaminated with inorganic compounds that hardly serve a biological purpose.
Ironically, we expend tremendous quantities of energy fertilizing soils synthetically, seeking to put back what we take from them when we grow and consume crops. For poorer countries, this odd and almost anti-ecological juxtaposition presents a huge problem: Lacking the capital-intensive sewer infrastructure of the “first world,” they often have few places to treat and dispose of sewage. As a result, it often finds itself in drinking water sources and serving as a contaminant responsible for waterborne disease.
Also lacking means to finance and practice synthetic or energy-intensive fertilization, their soils rapidly lose their fertility and eventually fall prone to “desertification,” or the degradation of topsoil to the point where it can no longer support crops. This consequently leads to food shortages, droughts from evaporation and runoff, eventual malnutrition and its accompanying diseases – not to mention warfare. To us, ignoring this biological waste disposal system just means wasting tremendous amounts of potential resources. To developing countries, it results in disease and death.
To be fair, there is more human waste now than ever before – there are simply more humans, even if the vast majority of them are generally underfed.
Nonetheless, efforts do exist to curb this inefficiency by implementing human composting. Sancor’s “Envirolet” composting toilet is one of the most popular options for consumers. But the more extensive work is being done by utilities and governments, as well as nonprofits and aid organizations, who try figure out what to do with untreated sewage – often highly contaminated with heavy metals and chemicals – as well as pure human waste.
Yet our efforts are encumbered less by cost and technological incapability than they are by stigma and apathy. This is where environmentalists always face a problem they must be aware of. While a system of human waste composting might seem like a perfectly reasonable undertaking in a Northwest college town like Eugene, Berkeley or Arcata, Calif., it’s going to be difficult, and legitimately so, in places where infrastructure hardly exists to recycle aluminum cans.
Proposing the recycling of what is, quite literally, “used food” through compost might further seem like a digression away from “real problems” that is laughable at best, and bat-shit crazy at worst. The idea might have more traction in places where sewage isn’t adequately dealt with already, such as developing countries. In other places, the effort might begin by expanding a dialogue between sewage treatment and solid waste utilities that compost yard waste, a dialogue that is often already established.
By utilizing existing infrastructure for food and yard waste composting, developing new infrastructure where it does not exist, and looking for opportunities for human waste solutions in places currently riddled with human waste problems, composting might prove a viable option to improve the sustainability of agriculture, waste management and the health of people.
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From waste to compost
Daily Emerald
April 14, 2009
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