posted April 24, 2004 03:35 PM         

For the living, three things are inevitable: death, taxes, and sh1t."
Dan Sabbath and Mandel Hall in End Product

When crops are produced from soil, it is imperative that the organic residues resulting from those crops, including animal excrements, are returned to the soil from which the crops originated. This recycling of all organic residues for agricultural purposes should be axiomatic to sustainable agriculture. Yet, spokespersons for sustainable agriculture movements remain silent about using humanure for agricultural purposes. Why?

Perhaps because there is currently a profound lack of knowledge and understanding about what is referred to as the "human nutrient cycle" and the need to keep the cycle intact. The human nutrient cycle goes like this: a) grow food, b) eat it, c) collect and process the organic residues (feces, urine, food scraps, and agricultural materials), and d) return the processed organic material back to the soil, thereby enriching the soil and enabling more food to be grown. The cycle is repeated, endlessly. This is a sustainable process that mimics the natural cycles of nature and enhances our ability to survive on this planet. When our food refuse is instead discarded as waste, the natural human nutrient cycle is broken, creating problems such as pollution, loss of soil fertility, and abuse of our water resources.

We in the United States each waste about a thousand pounds of humanure every year, which is discarded into sewers and septic systems throughout the land. Much of the discarded humanure finds its final resting place in a landfill, along with the other solid waste we Americans discard, which, coincidentally, also amounts to about a thousand pounds per person per year. For a population of 250 million people, that adds up to nearly 250 million tons of solid waste personally discarded by us every year, at least half of which is valuable as an agricultural resource.

The practice we humans have frequently employed for waste disposal has been quite primitive - we dump our garbage into holes in the ground, then bury it. That's called a landfill, and for many years they were that simple. Today's new "sanitary" landfills are lined with waterproof synthetic materials to prevent the leaching of garbage juice into groundwater supplies. Yet, only about one third of the active dumps in the US have these liners.4 Interestingly, the lined landfills bear an uncanny resemblance to gigantic disposable diapers. They are gargantuan plastic lined receptacles where we lay our crap to rest, the layers being carefully folded over and the end products of our wasteful lifestyles buried as if they were in garbage mausoleums intended to preserve our sludge and kitchen trash for posterity. We conveniently flush our toilets and the resultant sewage sludge is transported to these landfills, tucked into these huge disposable diapers, and buried.

This is not to suggest that sewage should instead be used to produce food crops. In my opinion, it should not. Sewage consists of humanure collected with hazardous materials such as industrial, medical, and chemical wastes, all carried in a common waterborne waste stream. Or in the words of Gary Gardner (State of the World 1998), "Tens of thousands of toxic substances and chemical compounds used in industrial economies, including PCBs, pesticides, dioxins, heavy metals, asbestos, petroleum products, and industrial solvents, are potentially part of sewage flows." Not to mention pathogenic organisms. When raw sewage was used in Berlin in 1949, for example, it was blamed for the spread of worm-related diseases. In the 1980s, it was said to be the cause of typhoid fever in Santiago, and in 1970 and 1991, it was blamed for cholera outbreaks in Jerusalem and South America, respectively.5

Humanure, on the other hand, when kept out of the sewers, collected as a resource material, and properly processed (composted), makes a fine agricultural resource suitable for food crops. When we combine our manure with other organic materials such as our food discards, we can achieve a blend that is irresistible to certain very beneficial microorganisms.

The US EPA estimates that nearly 22 million tons of food waste are produced in American cities every year. Throughout the United States, food losses at the retail, consumer, and food services levels are estimated to have been 48 million tons in 1995.6 That would make great organic material for composting with humanure. Instead, only 2.4% of our discarded food was being composted in the US in 1994; the remaining 97.6% was apparently incinerated or buried in landfills.7

In 1998, industrial countries were only reusing 11% of their organic garbage.8 The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group made up primarily of western industrial countries, estimates that 36% of the waste in their member states is organic food and garden materials. If paper is also considered, the organic share of the waste stream is boosted to nearly an incredible two thirds! In developing countries, organic material typically makes up one-half to two-thirds of the waste stream.9 According to the EPA, almost 80% of the net discarded solid waste in the US is composed of organic material (see Figure 2.1).

It is becoming more and more obvious that it is unwise to rely on landfills to dispose of recyclable materials. Landfills fill up, and new ones need to be built to replace them. The estimated cost of building and maintaining an EPA approved landfill is now nearly $125 million and rising. The 8,000 operating landfills we had in the United States in 1988 had dwindled to 5,812 by the end of 1991. By 1996, only 3,091 remained.10

In fact, we may be lucky that landfills are closing so rapidly. They are notorious polluters of water, soil, and air. Of the ten thousand landfills that have closed since 1982, 20% are now listed as hazardously contaminated Superfund sites. A 1996 report from the state of Florida revealed that groundwater contamination plumes from older, unlined landfills can be longer than 3.4 miles, and that 523 public water supplies in Florida are located within one mile of these closed landfills, while 2,700 lie within three miles of one.11 No doubt similar situations exist throughout the United States.

Organic material disposed of in landfills also creates large quantities of methane, a major global-warming gas. US landfills are "among the single greatest contributors of global methane emissions," according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. According to the EPA, methane is 20 to 30 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse (global warming) gas on a molecule to molecule basis.12

Tipping fees (the fee one pays to dump waste) at landfills in every region of the US have been increasing at more than twice the rate of inflation since 1986. In fact, since then, they have increased 300% and are expected to continue rising at this rate.

In developing countries, the landfill picture is also bleak. In Brazil, for example, virtually all (99%) of the solid waste is dumped into landfills, and three-fourths of the 90,000 tons per day ends up in open dumps.14 Slowly we're catching on to the fact that this throw-away trend has to be turned around. We can't continue to throw "away" usable resources in a wasteful fashion by burying them in disappearing, polluting, increasingly expensive, landfills.

As a result, recycling is now becoming more widespread in the US. Between 1989 and 1992, recycling increased from 9 to 14%, and the amount of US municipal solid waste sent to landfills decreased by 8%.15 The national average for the recycling of all materials in US cities had jumped to 27% by 1998.16 Composting is also beginning to catch on in a big way in some areas of the world. In the United States, the 700 composting facilities in 1989 grew to more than 3,200 by 1996. Although this is a welcomed trend, it doesn't adequately address a subject still sorely in need of attention: what to do with humanure, which is rarely being recycled anywhere in the western world.

If we had scraped up all the human excrement in the world and piled it on the world's tillable land in 1950, we'd have applied nearly 200 metric tons per square mile at that time (roughly 690 pounds per acre). In the year 2000, we'll be collecting significantly more than double that amount because the global population is increasing, but the global land mass isn't. In fact, the global area of agricultural land is steadily decreasing as the world loses, for farming and grazing, an area the size of Kansas each year.17 The world's burgeoning human population is producing a ballooning amount of organic refuse which will eventually have to be dealt with responsibly and constructively. It's not too soon to begin to understand human organic refuse materials as valuable resource materials begging to be recycled.

In 1950, the dollar value of the agricultural nutrients in the world's gargantuan pile of humanure was 6.93 billion dollars. In 2000, it will be worth 18.67 billion dollars (calculated in 1975 prices).18 This is money currently being flushed out somewhere into the environment where it shows up as pollution and landfill material. Every pipeline has an outlet somewhere; everything thrown "away" just moves from one place to another. Humanure and other organic refuse materials are no exception. Not only are we flushing "money" away, we're paying through the nose to do so. The cost is not only economic, it's environmental.

Source: The Humanure Handbook. Jenkins Publishing, PO Box 607, Grove City, PA 16127. To order, phone: 1-800-639-4099.

posted April 25, 2004 11:56 AM         

I was just at a gathering where we had some composting toilets and we used dried, fallen leaves which were readily available on the forested land there. They worked great. I know it may sound unbelievable but honestly, there was no smell.

posted April 25, 2004 04:01 PM         

I've had a compost potty in my home for over a year now and I'll never go back to a flush toilet. I feel like I'm taking responsiblity for myself and the enviroment. I use the compost to grow my baby trees and bushes. They neighbors have never complained and the smell is minimal even in the 100 degree weather of summer. I know a lot of people have trouble wrapping their brains around this subject, but it is worth investigating if you want to do something on your own to improve your enviroment.

skywych

posted April 25, 2004 08:27 PM         

Freud would have a party with my sh!tty attitude.

j/k... in light of our past....
This actually sounds natural and normal. Thanks for filling me in.

posted April 27, 2004 01:14 PM         

Rudolf Steiner in his book 'Agriculture' said that this would become a reality, and that was back in 1924, he advised against it saying the natural cycle was plant to animal back to plant and then to man, and that human faeces should never be ingested!

You would quickly become very ill, but the so called experts know best. Use some rational thinking people, most of us are in ill health and don't have all the nutrients in our body to make a healthy compost. What about the pharmaceutical drugs that are excreted? What happens to them? I bet the experts haven't even thought about that.

posted April 27, 2004 04:32 PM         

You have to let the humanure sit for a year before you use it. There has been several research papers done on this topic in the past couple of years. And after reading them, I switched over.

Have you ever been to a sewage plant? Where do you think they put all of the sludge? They put it on fields to cure and reuse it as compost. So there is a possiblity that you are already eating food that has been grown on these fields. This has been going on for years in the US.

If a person had an infectious disease, no I would not want their donation, so to speak. But, it has been scientifically proven that most of the parasites people carry can not live outside the body for any length of time. As far as the toxins people take into their bodies as medicine, even they degrade just sitting in their bottles at home.

This is a subject that offends some people, but I look at it like this; I've raised animals for food and used their manure for my garden, I just have to let this type of manure sit longer. I mean my gosh, it's not like you take a roll of toilet paper and magazine out to the garden.

posted April 27, 2004 07:34 PM         

The ideal way to compost humanure is thermophillically. That means that if the pile gets the proper balance of oxygen, moisture, carbon and nitrogen, special bacteria that live in humanure are activated and the pile heats up to 120 - 150 degrees F for varying lengths of time. This combined with curing it for a year after the pile is complete kills over 99% of the pathogens.

Now, the pharmacuetical drug issue is quite valid. Assuridly one that is being addressed by experts. One possible solution is when the compost is first used, planting a crop of an accummulator plant, which have been shown to absorb the residual chemicals left in the soil. I know for a fact that dandelions are one example of an accumulator plant but I'm not sure if they are one the variety shown to absorb pharmacueticals. After harvest you would then have to dispose of them in some way other than returning them to the soil. There are plants that eat diesel fuel! It's cool.

Joseph Jenkins has been composting his family's humanure for 20 years and using the hummus for his vegetable garden. He's had no problem with illness or the like.

Rudolph Steiner says the cycle is from plant to animal to plant to human. My problem with this is it insinuates humans are not a part of nature. We are animals after all. What does he propose we do with humanure?

Actually we (as in the whole planet) are serving as gunea pigs in the gigantic experiment of western style sewage treatment. It comes at great cost to our enviroment. We are polluting the waters and turning our farmland into barren desert by not returning to it the nutrients we extract. It's an experiment that is failing. It's certainly not the natural state of things if you consider natural to mean in balance.

posted April 29, 2004 09:52 PM         

Although I wouldn't advocate the same methods used, the Chinese have been fertilizing their crops for thousands of years with 'nightsoil'- raw human excrement. This undoubtedly is not the safeset way of restoring nutrients to the soil but it shows an understanding of the extreme importance of returning what we take from the soil. There is a reason that they have been feeding millions of people off the same cropland for thousands of years and by contrast, here in the US our cropland is becoming desertified in just a couple hundred years.

When I hear your reasoning behind rejection of this method hinges on the writings of Rudolf Steiner I am frustrated because I need to know that you are open to hearing what I have to say with an open mind to make your own decision based on evidence at hand.

Also, when you continue to refer to this method as 'eating your own feces' I feel frustration because that's not an accurate account of what I'm talking about. I sense you are afraid of the idea of composting humanure? What would it take for your fears about this to be calmed?

posted April 29, 2004 11:52 PM         

This is a tough subject for lots of people. It takes some serious thinking to get a grip on it.

Maybe it would help if I explain how the toilet works. First it looks the same as most other flush toilets. It stands higher than a standard toilet. It's white, heavy duty plastic and has a drawer in the bottom of it. It works like a wood stove. You put the wood inside, burn it up and dump the ashes. Well with the comp potty, you are dumping a compost mixture. There is sawdust, cedar shavings, peat moss, pine needles or what ever you want to use.

Some of the potties have a heater and fan. Mine is non-electric so the compost is wet, not dry. You throw in a couple of hands full of dry compost to absorb the fluids, after you use it. When the drawer is half full you empty on to a compost pile.

The compost bin is three separte bins. The first one is for the freshest, when dry it is moved to second bin. When completely dry and mixed with yard waste, it is moved into the third bin. There it will cure for the
rest of the year.

There is no fresh feces laying around. No smell, no bugs or flies swarming. It's just a compost pile with some humanure in it.

There really are sludge fields. The sewer plants sell the sludge to small farmer and they cure the stuff for a couple of years. It's big business around here. This sludge is from cities, not the small town down the road or from your home, but from millions of other people. I'd rather take care of my own and I don't buy compost anymore, unless it came from the chickens or horses I can see running in the yard or field.

posted May 01, 2004 08:09 PM         

He just creates a box with a hole in the top that holds a 5 gallon bucket inside and then the toilet seat on top. Then a bucket of sawdust, leaves, etc. next to it. When a 'contribution' is made, it is thoroughly covered with the carbon material until you can't see it or smell it. When it's ready for emptying he takes it out to the bin. He only has two. With a hoe or a shovel he makes an indentation in the top in which to depost the contents of the bucket. This is so it's deposited into the termmophillically active part of the pile. Then he covers it with a fresh layer of straw, every time. He also adds all the kitchen food scraps to the pile, which he says is essential. It creates little pockets of air so that the pile can 'breathe', which keeps the process aerobic as opposed to anaerobic which is smellier and doesn't heat up. He monitors the temperature and moisure levels to keep the thermophillic bacteria active. Not to dry but not too wet either. Once the pile has been built up for a year he stops adding to it and lets it sit for a year while he starts the process over in the second bin.
Hmm.. Here's a link that perhaps can explain it better than me. http://www.weblife.org/humanure/chapter8_2.html

Sounds basically like what you are doing, skywych but without the transferring of the pile from one bin to another. That sounds like alot of work. I'm getting tired just thinking about it!

posted July 04, 2004 12:52 PM         

The point seems to be against concentrating human feces in unnaturally large amounts. He in fact seems to have nothing against the use of manures and organic material in the proportions they would occur naturally, arguing that the amount of feces we produce is quite sufficient. He compares what happens from applying excessive human feces to eating asparagus (The chemical which gives asparagus it's distinctive smell is apparently excreted in the urine. A fun experiment to try is: the next time you eat asparagus, pay close attention to the smell the next few times you urinate - it will smell like asparagus!). Now it is known that substances such as heavy metals tend to get concentrated in the leaves of plants. His argument is perhaps foreseeing the gradual buildup of toxic metals, or other toxins, which pass straight to the plants and then the animals that eat them. If human feces is not diluted properly with other natural materials, I could see this being a problem.

In any case, what is known is that human manure IS highly dangerous if applied raw to fields, and that it requires a significant amount of high carbon material to get it to compost properly. Rudolf Steiner does not mention composting the manure, so I would take that to mean it is raw human manure he is referring to, not manure that has been composted with a diverse mix of other organic material to render it safe. Certainly during the time period he lived, the health hazards of raw feces must have been known.

Finally, we must remember that the opinions of a single human being are not always correct. A single person, no matter how insightful, may draw false conclusions due to misinformation, misleading observations, or any number of reasons. For example, Steiner's statement that "It has very little effect as manure" (referring to human feces) seems to be demonstrably false. Just take a look at the way nightsoil (human excrement) is such a highly valued commodity to farmers in Asia. If human feces is treated properly, it is not harmful, even if we consider the effect after many generations. Consider the example of the civilization known as the Hunzas, which compost all of their organic refuse, including human feces, have been doing so for many centuries, and are among the healthiest people known to mankind. The composting of human feces is by no means an "experiment" - it has been going on for centuries.

posted July 09, 2004 03:13 PM         

Okay, the humanure thing..from a Science geek perspective it sounds like a great idea if it is done properly. The process indicated takes two years and by that time the dangerous chemicals and bacteria are broken down leaving only the necessary nutrients, which many have been contributed by the addition of the fruit and veges.

Breaking down the poo to the basic components will result in superior nutrients for the garden / soil. I think there is a common misconception that confuses 'Humanure' with night fertilizer. The night fertilizer is the what is used by 3rd world countries where the poo is put directly on the fields without any drying / compost time.

That creates a public health hazard brought out by exposure to flies, bacteria and parasites carried by humans.

Now, I am not $hitting you..my brother refers to me as the $hitologist because of my background working in Vet med and then with a larvicide - so I had to deal with monkey / baboon poo, mouse poo, rat poo, cat poo, dog poo, horse poo, chicken poo and cow poo..oh yeah and really stinky pig poo. LMAO..and most of this poo I have seen under a microscope...I am one with the "poo god". LOL..

posted July 10, 2004 11:14 PM         

Pidaua, LOL .. thanks for sharing your 'poo sense' with us. The multifacedness (did I just make that word up? ) of your knowledge continues to surprise me.