6 ms·

Reimagined toilets at a South Korea university transform human waste into biogas

65 points by anw 5y ago

kumarvvr 5y ago
What happens to the leftover content after the methane is extracted? Can it be used as a manure or is it safe to be dumped underground or in rivers?
- mikro2nd 5y ago
  Excellent manure, feedstock for compost. Still too toxic for dumping into rivers.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    https://humanurehandbook.com/ https://humanurehandbook.com/
    - mikro2nd 5y ago
      Deeply familiar with it :) and the Humanure Book goes on at length about how to compost the shit and make very sure it is safe to use. The solids that come out of a methane digester must be composted to render them safe.
- DoingIsLearning 5y ago
  I'm pretty there are all sort of health issues in using human sewage as compost. Look at North Korea for an example of that.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ReptileMan 5y ago
    North Korea is also terrible example about having government at all. IIRC the problem was that they were using improperly treated waste.
  - pkphilip 5y ago
    There are already ways of converting human waste into protein. 100kgs of human waste can be converted into 40kgs of protein. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/07/06/from-feces-to-flies-to-feed-innovating-the-lifecycle-of-human-waste/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/07/06/from-fec...
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      Yummie Brownies!
  - hulitu 5y ago
    I would like to look. Do you have some links ?
    - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
      As far as I understand they have a shortage of everything, including livestock, so they end up using human feces as compost. This becomes a disease vector and you end up with ground water and vegetables contaminated with all sorts of parasites. This is specially critical for children because intestinal worms effectively hijack what little nutrients they can eat, creating even more malnourishment. [0] [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-unicef-idUSKBN1JG2Q4 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-unicef-idUSKBN...
- GravitasFailure 5y ago
  >Can it be used as a manure or is it safe to be dumped underground or in rivers? Absolutely! A danger of human waste is that it carries a lot of pathogens that might be benign or beneficial in the lower intestine of one person but cause disease in the stomach of another, but the solution to that problem is to let it ferment/decompose for a bit and let all the bacteria kill themselves off through starvation and cooking in their own metabolic heat, and during that process is when you collect the methane. You'll often see large piles of cow manure composting in big piles for similar reasons, though the methane isn't always captured. The danger to dumping any kind of waste into a river, treated or not, is that it will start killing anything that finds it toxic (most likely your fish and amphibians) and feed anything that finds it nutritious (algae, bacteria), which can cause ecological imbalances and generally screw up your ecosystem. For an adjacent example, look at the Gulf dead zone caused by fertilizer runoff from the American corn belt: Fertilizer feeds algae, which then chokes out other plants fish need to survive and absorb oxygen when the algae dies off, leaving a large swath of ocean without fish or anything that relies on fish.
kmarc 5y ago
What a "shitty" topic to talk about, shall we? I am happy to see a growing number of headlines about "rethinking" human waste management at any scale. Flushing toilets with potable water seems just very wrong, and a luxury I always thought western societies can afford only.* The system that the article describes is a funny one, or at least is sold with humor ("get paid as you poop"). Apart from the technology itself, I think a good amount of being easygoing on the topic is important here: as how sex sells clothing, fart jokes sell novel feces-recycling systems! Another example (no affiliation) is Kompotoi here in Switzerland: https://www.kompotoi.ch/ https://www.kompotoi.ch/ (English available) I was honored to do a particular type of business on these $5.000 toilets in the Swiss alps at 6.500ft, and admittedly felt like a king sitting on the throne of recycling! Bottom line: drinkingwater-flushed toilets are not sustainable, nor accessible/affordable for the majority of the world, so let's stop being ignorant and seek for solutions. Happy pooping! * disclaimer: I grew up in Eastern European countryside, with no daily access to water flush toilets until I was around 8yo
- sensitive-ears 5y ago
  There are plenty of places around the world with western style toilets but flushed with rainwater or recycled washing machine/shower water instead. That seems like a fairly sustainable solution that already works?
  - kmarc 5y ago
    Yes, those are better solutions, however still not really sustainable, and without incentives to build the accompanied infrastructure, it's never going to be sustainable; whereas solutions like the composting toilets are fairly easy to implement - FWIW ~ that's what we had before water flush toilets, isn't it?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > Flushing toilets with potable water seems just very wrong, and a luxury I always thought western societies can afford only. I assume the cost and potentially even environmental impact of reusing existing potable water infrastructure to provide water for toilet-flushing is much less than manufacturing, installing & maintaining separate local systems (to collect rainwater, etc) for this purpose.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Don't mean to shit on it, butT central waste water treatment plants also do this. At least some. So I don't really get the novelty of it?
- jalk 5y ago
  In Copenhagen, 30-50% of the gas in the consumer network is produced like this.
- dandanua 5y ago
  The novelty is that they want to use feces as a universal currency. This idea is very precious indeed, if you look close enough.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Sure... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wishing-Table,_the_Gold-Ass,_and_the_Cudgel_in_the_Sack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wishing-Table,_the_Gold-As...
angus-prune 5y ago
Methane from sewage was used in London gas lamps since the 1890s when the Webb Sewer gas lamp was invented. [https://nikmorton.webs.com/webbgaslamps.htm https://nikmorton.webs.com/webbgaslamps.htm] The most famous surviving example is next to The Savoy hotel on The Strand [https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/Farting-Lane/ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/F...]
lasagnaphil 5y ago
Holy shit... By the way, there's a weird-ass Korean adult animation about a dystopian world that has (tried to) solve their energy crisis by burning human feces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aachi_%26_Ssipak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aachi_%26_Ssipak https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0972542/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0972542/ Maybe those researchers have been inspired from that movie. Ah, how life imitates art... The plot (highly NSFW by the way): "Somewhere in the future, mankind has depleted all energy and fuel sources, however they have somehow engineered a way to use human excrement as fuel. To reward production, the government hands out extremely addictive, popsicle-like "Juicybars" to citizens, which in turn also makes them constipated. Aachi and Ssipak are street hoodlums who struggle to survive by trading black market Juicybars. Through a chain of events involving their porn-director acquaintance Jimmy the Freak, they meet a porn star named Beautiful, who gets a pink ring inside her butt which makes her defecations rewarded by exceptional quantities of Juicybars. For that reason, Beautiful is also wanted by the violent blue mutants known as the Diaper Gang (led by the Diaper King), the police (most notably the cyborg police officer Geko), and others."
- Lio 5y ago
  Mad Max III also described a post apocalyptic world powered by methane made from pig shit. So it seems like a commonish theme.
  - lasagnaphil 5y ago
    Although the comment was written as a half-joke, it's an incredibly obtuse and specific South Korean reference that others might not know, and I thought it would be fun to post about it.
    - Lio 5y ago
      Yep definitely. I appreciated it and didn’t know it previously. So cheers.
b0rsuk 5y ago
The headline is an euphemism of the year!
dandanua 5y ago
Meanwhile, there is a "War on Poop" in North Korea https://youtu.be/8yqa-SdJtT4?t=1898 https://youtu.be/8yqa-SdJtT4?t=1898
specialist 5y ago
I keep expecting to see squat toilets. Especially for public facilities. Nothing to break. Use power washer to clean. Doubles as a floor drain. I'd use a squat toilet in my house if it had some kind of air lock. Maybe like the Tidy Diaper Pail. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tidy-Diaper-Pail-Pearl/900658925 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tidy-Diaper-Pail-Pearl/900658925 Pure frikkin genius.
xor99 5y ago
Urine powered phones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTprRQTKAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTprRQTKAw MFCs (Microbial fuel cells) are waiting to feast on all manner of horrible stuff and produce energy. I'm not sure where economic incentives for peeing and pooing would go long term though.
decebalus1 5y ago
I don't get the novelty. My uncle used to work in Sweden on a project similar to this in the 80s.
supperburg 5y ago
I’m convinced that the solution is a system that uses a long tubular plastic liner that continuously renews the surface of the bowl between uses and simultaneously traps the session products in a sealed bag via thermo sealing. Why do it this way? Uses no water while not allowing the accumulation of smelly material. But why seal the product into bags? The waste needs to be disinfected before it can be disposed of in a casual manner. And ideally the smell should be neutralized. I think the best way to do this is by heating it up. Incinerating your poop every time you poop is too energy intensive. Instead, you can save up the bags and then burn them in large batches. Or send them off to be processed elsewhere.
- tdeck 5y ago
  Sounds like the loowatt system: https://www.loowatt.com/toilets.html https://www.loowatt.com/toilets.html

65 points by anw 5y ago

What happens to the leftover content after the methane is extracted? Can it be used as a manure or is it safe to be dumped underground or in rivers?

mikro2nd 5y ago
Excellent manure, feedstock for compost. Still too toxic for dumping into rivers.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  https://humanurehandbook.com/ https://humanurehandbook.com/
  - mikro2nd 5y ago
    Deeply familiar with it :) and the Humanure Book goes on at length about how to compost the shit and make very sure it is safe to use. The solids that come out of a methane digester must be composted to render them safe.
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
I'm pretty there are all sort of health issues in using human sewage as compost. Look at North Korea for an example of that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ReptileMan 5y ago
  North Korea is also terrible example about having government at all. IIRC the problem was that they were using improperly treated waste.
- pkphilip 5y ago
  There are already ways of converting human waste into protein. 100kgs of human waste can be converted into 40kgs of protein. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/07/06/from-feces-to-flies-to-feed-innovating-the-lifecycle-of-human-waste/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/07/06/from-fec...
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Yummie Brownies!
- hulitu 5y ago
  I would like to look. Do you have some links ?
  - DoingIsLearning 5y ago
    As far as I understand they have a shortage of everything, including livestock, so they end up using human feces as compost. This becomes a disease vector and you end up with ground water and vegetables contaminated with all sorts of parasites. This is specially critical for children because intestinal worms effectively hijack what little nutrients they can eat, creating even more malnourishment. [0] [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-unicef-idUSKBN1JG2Q4 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-unicef-idUSKBN...
GravitasFailure 5y ago
>Can it be used as a manure or is it safe to be dumped underground or in rivers? Absolutely! A danger of human waste is that it carries a lot of pathogens that might be benign or beneficial in the lower intestine of one person but cause disease in the stomach of another, but the solution to that problem is to let it ferment/decompose for a bit and let all the bacteria kill themselves off through starvation and cooking in their own metabolic heat, and during that process is when you collect the methane. You'll often see large piles of cow manure composting in big piles for similar reasons, though the methane isn't always captured. The danger to dumping any kind of waste into a river, treated or not, is that it will start killing anything that finds it toxic (most likely your fish and amphibians) and feed anything that finds it nutritious (algae, bacteria), which can cause ecological imbalances and generally screw up your ecosystem. For an adjacent example, look at the Gulf dead zone caused by fertilizer runoff from the American corn belt: Fertilizer feeds algae, which then chokes out other plants fish need to survive and absorb oxygen when the algae dies off, leaving a large swath of ocean without fish or anything that relies on fish.

kmarc 5y ago

What a "shitty" topic to talk about, shall we? I am happy to see a growing number of headlines about "rethinking" human waste management at any scale. Flushing toilets with potable water seems just very wrong, and a luxury I always thought western societies can afford only.* The system that the article describes is a funny one, or at least is sold with humor ("get paid as you poop"). Apart from the technology itself, I think a good amount of being easygoing on the topic is important here: as how sex sells clothing, fart jokes sell novel feces-recycling systems! Another example (no affiliation) is Kompotoi here in Switzerland: https://www.kompotoi.ch/ https://www.kompotoi.ch/ (English available) I was honored to do a particular type of business on these $5.000 toilets in the Swiss alps at 6.500ft, and admittedly felt like a king sitting on the throne of recycling! Bottom line: drinkingwater-flushed toilets are not sustainable, nor accessible/affordable for the majority of the world, so let's stop being ignorant and seek for solutions. Happy pooping! * disclaimer: I grew up in Eastern European countryside, with no daily access to water flush toilets until I was around 8yo

sensitive-ears 5y ago
There are plenty of places around the world with western style toilets but flushed with rainwater or recycled washing machine/shower water instead. That seems like a fairly sustainable solution that already works?
- kmarc 5y ago
  Yes, those are better solutions, however still not really sustainable, and without incentives to build the accompanied infrastructure, it's never going to be sustainable; whereas solutions like the composting toilets are fairly easy to implement - FWIW ~ that's what we had before water flush toilets, isn't it?
Nextgrid 5y ago
> Flushing toilets with potable water seems just very wrong, and a luxury I always thought western societies can afford only. I assume the cost and potentially even environmental impact of reusing existing potable water infrastructure to provide water for toilet-flushing is much less than manufacturing, installing & maintaining separate local systems (to collect rainwater, etc) for this purpose.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

Don't mean to shit on it, butT central waste water treatment plants also do this. At least some. So I don't really get the novelty of it?

jalk 5y ago
In Copenhagen, 30-50% of the gas in the consumer network is produced like this.
dandanua 5y ago
The novelty is that they want to use feces as a universal currency. This idea is very precious indeed, if you look close enough.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Sure... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wishing-Table,_the_Gold-Ass,_and_the_Cudgel_in_the_Sack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wishing-Table,_the_Gold-As...

angus-prune 5y ago

Methane from sewage was used in London gas lamps since the 1890s when the Webb Sewer gas lamp was invented. [https://nikmorton.webs.com/webbgaslamps.htm https://nikmorton.webs.com/webbgaslamps.htm] The most famous surviving example is next to The Savoy hotel on The Strand [https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/Farting-Lane/ https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/F...]

lasagnaphil 5y ago

Holy shit... By the way, there's a weird-ass Korean adult animation about a dystopian world that has (tried to) solve their energy crisis by burning human feces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aachi_%26_Ssipak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aachi_%26_Ssipak https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0972542/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0972542/ Maybe those researchers have been inspired from that movie. Ah, how life imitates art... The plot (highly NSFW by the way): "Somewhere in the future, mankind has depleted all energy and fuel sources, however they have somehow engineered a way to use human excrement as fuel. To reward production, the government hands out extremely addictive, popsicle-like "Juicybars" to citizens, which in turn also makes them constipated. Aachi and Ssipak are street hoodlums who struggle to survive by trading black market Juicybars. Through a chain of events involving their porn-director acquaintance Jimmy the Freak, they meet a porn star named Beautiful, who gets a pink ring inside her butt which makes her defecations rewarded by exceptional quantities of Juicybars. For that reason, Beautiful is also wanted by the violent blue mutants known as the Diaper Gang (led by the Diaper King), the police (most notably the cyborg police officer Geko), and others."

Lio 5y ago
Mad Max III also described a post apocalyptic world powered by methane made from pig shit. So it seems like a commonish theme.
- lasagnaphil 5y ago
  Although the comment was written as a half-joke, it's an incredibly obtuse and specific South Korean reference that others might not know, and I thought it would be fun to post about it.
  - Lio 5y ago
    Yep definitely. I appreciated it and didn’t know it previously. So cheers.

b0rsuk 5y ago

The headline is an euphemism of the year!

dandanua 5y ago

Meanwhile, there is a "War on Poop" in North Korea https://youtu.be/8yqa-SdJtT4?t=1898 https://youtu.be/8yqa-SdJtT4?t=1898

specialist 5y ago

I keep expecting to see squat toilets. Especially for public facilities. Nothing to break. Use power washer to clean. Doubles as a floor drain. I'd use a squat toilet in my house if it had some kind of air lock. Maybe like the Tidy Diaper Pail. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tidy-Diaper-Pail-Pearl/900658925 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tidy-Diaper-Pail-Pearl/900658925 Pure frikkin genius.

xor99 5y ago

Urine powered phones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTprRQTKAw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTprRQTKAw MFCs (Microbial fuel cells) are waiting to feast on all manner of horrible stuff and produce energy. I'm not sure where economic incentives for peeing and pooing would go long term though.

decebalus1 5y ago

I don't get the novelty. My uncle used to work in Sweden on a project similar to this in the 80s.

supperburg 5y ago

I’m convinced that the solution is a system that uses a long tubular plastic liner that continuously renews the surface of the bowl between uses and simultaneously traps the session products in a sealed bag via thermo sealing. Why do it this way? Uses no water while not allowing the accumulation of smelly material. But why seal the product into bags? The waste needs to be disinfected before it can be disposed of in a casual manner. And ideally the smell should be neutralized. I think the best way to do this is by heating it up. Incinerating your poop every time you poop is too energy intensive. Instead, you can save up the bags and then burn them in large batches. Or send them off to be processed elsewhere.

tdeck 5y ago
Sounds like the loowatt system: https://www.loowatt.com/toilets.html https://www.loowatt.com/toilets.html