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Our current habit of disposing of crap sight unseen in ways that flush all those essential nutrients into the oceans may seem like a great improvement over the
by jbotz 6y ago
Our current habit of disposing of crap sight unseen in ways that flush all those essential nutrients into the oceans may seem like a great improvement over the stench of the big cities at the end of the 19th century, but it is also entirely unsustainable.
Agriculture has gotten by with synthetic fertilizers for a while, but N, P, and K aren't everything plants need... they also yearn for the countless micro-nutrients in our bodily wastes which are lost when we flush. And while N (Nitrogen) and K (Potassium) aren't likely to run out any time soon, P (Phosphorus) is in limited supply and finding enough of it for our agricultural needs may become a serious problem later this century. Not to mention the fact that producing NPK fertilizer takes a lot of energy.
Hopefully most of us won't have to give up the flush toilet, but we absolutely will have find better ways of dealing with the "downstream" product and start recovering its significant value. In the not-so-distant future shit will be valuable again.
- rauhl 6y ago> Our current habit of disposing of crap sight unseen in ways that flush all those essential nutrients into the oceans Is that the standard way of handling sewage? I have only toured one sewage-processing plant, and I am sure that there are many different types, but that one had huge (as I recall, building-sized) machines pulling all of the solids out of the sewage; this sludge was then loaded on trucks. I do not remember, now, if it was carted to landfills or composted, but of course it could be composted. Before using it for agriculture one would want to consider whether the medications and other contaminants are a problem. One cool thing about that plant I remember is that the water it produced was well within drinking-water standards: it could be connected straight to the water system.
- meanjeans 6y agoI've toured a few wastewater treatment plants (it's a hobby) on separate coasts of the US and it seems pretty standard to have some kind of fertilizer system in place, alongside on-site methane energy generation. And that end product water is drinkable, though it skeeves people out to do so.