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Good idea but not really new. The process of putting human waste onto farmers' fields and hence using it as compost has been going on for years.

The only thing you need to do is test it to make sure all pathogens have been destroyed. That might create a lot of work in the long run.

Ancient and modern Japan and Korea both use human manure "night soil" as the only fertiliser available in large quantities due to the lack of animal manure. The Americans (and the British) have got far too used to synthetic fertilisers for their industrialised farming production.

As I understand it using human waste as fertiliser is illegal in the UK. If he could persuade govt. that his system DOES produce a safe product he would be in on a winner.

However since the only known way of annihilating prions is by heating them up to humungous temperatures which would convert any carbon into CO2 I fear his project is doomed.

This article is decades out of date as they're already turning whole cities raw sewarge into methane which is then used to produce electricity they're even doing it in Dublin at it's not excatly the most advanced city to put it nicely.

Farmers in Germany ans even Indian have
been doing this for the best part of 15-20 years

This shows how out of touch the so-called "Ethical man" is
This "trip" across America and his whole series is more to do with his ego and the Guardian green tree hugging middle class guilt trip mentality rather than any actual means to be more efficent

Also why is it that the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú keep telling us that to "fight" so-called "climate change" that we have to drop our standard of living this is nonose as the most energy efficent develpopd country in the world is Switzerland (It uses ~4KW/perpson/day compared to an ~6KW )

We can increase our standard of living and still reduce our consumption of resoures and you don't have to blab on about it.

Also just because you're becoming more "green" you don't have to start telling half the country as that implies that you are doing to show-off and being very smug
"Oh look at me look how green I am"

A blog isn't a blog if pre-moderation is so slow that discussion cannot get started before the news is so old as to be irrelevant.

15 minutes to clear a message is too long for sensible debate to ensue.

This is definitely not new or even young it's middle aged. My brother in law is a farmer with an agricultural degree and back in the early seventies was working at an experimental farm in Hertfordshire where they used recycled human waste as fertiliser.
There were, however, problems and these problems eventually caused the project to be dropped. The main problem being that the process did not destroy all seeds, especially tomato seeds and that meant your nice crops of wheat, barley, whatever were studded with tomato plants. It turns out that survival strategy for some plants includes producing seeds resistant to human digestive systems.

Oh dear very out of date and also misses the real issue with using human waste, which is the the heavy metal contamination of agricultural soils. This is why the legislation (e.g. the Sewage Sludge Directive 1986) addresses this.It is well know that human waste and therefore sewage sludge tends to contain relatively high levels of copper, zinc, cadmium and other metals all of which may have a long term impact on soil fertility. Disappointing that the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú can't manage to research an issue properly perhaps they should have checked with the King of Compost before blogging such fiddlesticks.

zugcanton: you could try to sneer less and spell better (sewarge,excartly,ans nonose)
You sound very young and a little bit Swiss.
Remember what Harry Lime had to say about the Swiss and inventions.
All effort to try to better the planet is commendable.
Even failed or somewhat ineffective endeavours(bottle recycling for example) serve the purpose of raising awareness.
You may be confusing Dublin in Ireland with Dublin in Ohio.

There is a site in the Forest of Dean at which I regularly attend outdoor adventure events, and they have earth composting loos. It looks and is used the same as any toilet block anywhere, but instead of flushing with water, you just sprinkle some sawdust over your business. Everything piles up in a barrel underneath, and when it is full, it is left to compost for around 6 months, after which it can be used.

It is surprisingly effective and doesn't smell at all. Apparently the key to not having it smell is to keep it dry, hence the sawdust.

Fine idea! But how are city dwellers of which most of us are, going to 'use' humanure to grow tasty vegetables and cereals?
Would Prince Charles and his neighbours like to have Gloucestershire smelling like the Chinese countryside?
The world awaits the first garage genius to come up with a waterless toilet to turn humanure into the vegetarian gardener's sweet (smelling) dream. Or bicycles. And the ocean of water saved into swimming pools and lakes. Or irrigation for the Sahara, Gobi or California.

Read the book before you post your half-baked opinions people. It contains a reasonable, well researched and feasible technique of dealing with a world issue. This is not a man who s**ts in a field. I swear the bloggers on this site are as dim and misinformed as those on my home national news site, the CBC.

Ignorance is the mother of invention! Or, in this case, re-invention, since I was using composting toilets in Australia decades ago.

Nor are they unknown in the UK. Try googling 'composting toilet'.
sustainablebuild, for example, tells us:
'There are hundreds of different composting toilets, ranging from simple DIY designs to advanced high-tech commercial models.'

They seem to deal with many common pathogens OK, but I wonder how they cope with the new nasties we put through our bodies. I'm told that such is the quantity of estrogens in human urine, it is no longer considered safe to discharge it into sea water in marine parks in Australia.

just repeating - its not new. Had a trip from school 20 years ago to full sized sewage treatment plant that had input of only sewage . Output was feriliser, drinking water and electricity. So UK can do it but its costly to set up. Guess we'll not be doing much of that then.

Methane: Fuel of the Future, Singer Press

by Bell Boulter Dunlop & Keiller

JC Jenkins - Humanure Handbook is great... we were also inspired by Sim Van der Ryn's "The Toilet Papers"

see lots of info and photos about composting toilets on:

In India, from ancient times, in Kerala which is a southern west State, pine apples use to be raised in fields which had the human waste as manure. So much so many orthodox Hindus won't taste the fruit. The fruit itself has been given a slang name of "Kazhudai chakkai" (donkey's jack fruit). Hence somebody now turning the human waste to manure is not something new to India.

Actually, the key to eliminating smell is to keep the sawdust moist.

RE:chazzacant , walter_mitty - estrogen and smell could be being dealt with by rhodococcus bacteria as its common in soil and used for these purposes in some WWTP activated sludge beds.

RE: Chazzacant : it is no longer considered safe to discharge it into sea water in marine parks in Australia.....do they realy ? thought they might use toilets like most other people...lol

I have read the "Humanure Handbook" and I'm disappointed in a lot of the comments posted here. He directly addresses almost all the issues people are bringing up here.

He has developed a way that needs no testing to be sure the pathogens are gone. Composting materials with heavy metals actually inhibits plants from uptaking them, although keeping them out of the compost in the first place is the best approach to be sure.

Also "Night Soil" is human excrement that has not been composted. It smells awful and still contains large amounts of pathogens. It's not the same thing as humanure.

I found the book incredibly informative, useful, and am in the process of building my own simple composting toilet, which is surprisingly easy to do.

I think the majority of comments here are needlessly negative. We do have massive environmental issues worldwide and we should be seeking to constructively support and adopt wherever possible the innovations of change.
Guys like this need backing and encouragement and their ideas need careful analysis. The Government should be setting up scientific forums to properly consider those innovations of change that are aimed at arresting environmental destruction

Upfront I have not read this book, so I don't know if this issue was raised or addressed, but I highly doubt it.
Pharmaceuticals have been found in every body of drinking water tested in the US (I believe it was only fairly recently that any testing was done), and these are in part sourced to un-metabolized drugs excreted by patients- which is almost everyone these days. This includes hormones from birth control pills, etc. that can have an effect on human development. Obviously we're already being exposed to this anyway but it seems like concentrating the goods and applying it directly to growing food is only going to compound the issue. People concerned about hormones used in meat production would potentially have to worry even more about their vegetables, since these are actually human hormones.
Just a thought.

"Fruits of Joe's labour"!

All kinds of labour I guess!!

This practice of composting manure?

It's not the best thing that you can do with it. The composting process produces a usable fertiliser, sure - but a better treatment is to anaerobically digest the sewage rather than compost it, and use the digestate as fertiliser instead. You can optimise the AD process to sterilise the digestate (thus achieving pathogen kill) and the carbon balance of the process is better than composting (because you are producing biogas in the process which you use to offset fossil fuel usage.)

Problems with contaminants are best dealt with at source by means of better regulation of the trade effluent discharges, and tighter control of domestic inputs (ie. toilet cleaners etc.)

The result of the AD process is biogas, a liquid digestate and a solid digestate. Ideal for agricultural landspreading - as indeed it is in the UK under the provisions of the Sewage Sludge To Land Regs.

None of this is new - the practice of using AD for treating sewage in the UK goes back to Victorian times, and there are tens of thousands of AD plants worldwide at all sorts of size ranges. We don't have that many AD plants in the UK, but the ones that we do have are mainly for the treatment of sewage sludge, so we're already doing this. Far better than retrofitting compost toilets across the UK for a population which largely isn't interested, and increasingly doesn't have the space for them anyway. Use the modern infrastructure that we've painstakingly developed over the last century and a half instead!

Soylent Brown?

I've used Joe's Humanure system for several years, with no problems. I've had no issues with odor, flies, vermin, or other objectionable features. I live in a semi-arid climate with cold winters, dry summers, and low humidity. Humanure compost is not the same as "night soil"; it's composted with high temperatures encouraged to kill weed seeds and pathogens. The compost heats up for a time when new material is added. New additions to the pile are layered with cover material such as old hay or straw. When the bin is full, then the entire thing ages for at least one year. The collection process is simple and clean; one "flushes" with sawdust. The toilets can be put anywhere. The system is inexpensive to set up. All the details are in Joe's book, the first edition of which is available as a free download on his website.

@ 20

Yes, this method may destroy all pathogens but we both know that before it could be used it would have to be rigourously tested and then tested continuously after that.

Products that are used where human food is concerned is heavily scutinised.

Of course it's not new, Ethical Man is just encouraging awareness and educating those who do not already know about the subject. We should all be grateful and get motivated or continue to be motivated to do the same.

Ethical Man needs to find something useful to do. He is not going to save the world and other than prove the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú is losing the plot with respect to the myth of Man Made Global Warming he might spend his time looking at scientific facts and not garbage in-out computer predictions [wildly inaccurate] about which he has completely lost the plot.
Congratulations on joining Al Gore/James Hansen/Michael Mann and even George 'Moonbat' Monbiot.

One should expect a chit-eating grin from this happy cooker! It is doubtful that his plan to preserve human poo for popular recycle.

This is doubtless a clear example of American humors.

This whole ethical man thing is to raise awareness and hopefully start some worthwhile debate.
I did nt know about the Humanure Handbook, or about its subject matter. I feel people should read it before dismissing it.
So what if its old news, thats does not make it is not valid. Has any first world government spent resources on it. Some peoples cynical views, do not help, and lead to apathy. Lets be positive.

The most effective way to use human waste including garbage and feces on large scale would be to incinerate it. Incineration prevents release to the air of methane, which is even more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, carbon for carbon. The energy from incineration could replace energy from fossil fuels thus providing a sustainable form of energy. And the CO2 produced from incineration could be captured.

In the 1970s we had a school trip to Edmonton (North London) sewage works. At the time 'solid matter' went into digesters and the methane produced was used to provide the plant's electricity and power it's pumps. The digested waste was used as fertilizer.

So, as with most things 'green' and 'alternative' there's nothing new here.

In the early consumer days of the affordable personal computer boom of the 1980s the anachronism GIGO meant "Garbage In -Garbage Out' and meant that if software or programming or data entry or products service was to a very poor standard, the outcome would also be poor. Common, not complicated.

Apply this to mainstream diets today, vast sugar intake, fats and carbs, processing, colour and flavour enhancers, preservative stabilizers bulking agents and oft time excessive food consumption, even the hardest line rights defending fast food loving 'gourmets would concede that many aspects of vegetarian, vegan, organic, wild reared and hormone free foods also give a lot of people a living chance

But are there extensive studies comparing the compostings of dedicated big maxists and jelli frosted wotnotz customers to the compostings of brown rice green veg tea and wild salmon eaters? What do these studies show (or hide)?

Is there evidence to support the former group less keen to encounter produce grown in their intimate effluent, say, in the form of home grown tomatoes, than would the latter group?

Would each group be willing to engage in diet swapping temporarily - for the sake of gaining informed non-opposition? Are organic foods actually safe to eat? Was the popular movie documentary "Supersize It" faked? Did anybody ever really land on the moon (let alone play golf)? Just what is 'kreme'?

What is worth noting is that there are a very large number of septic tanks in the US, many more than might be popularly thought about, and that this is both partly because the country is so huge, and partly because being so huge many people live a long way from public sewers.

People being people, everyone has experienced the fact that something has to be done with ..it, and while the rare exceptionally dedicated beings explore the possibilities and all credit to them, mostly it is gravity flow flushings to an underground septic with a drainage leach field, or an outhouse with a wooden seat with a hole in it and a few Archer novels - to read, of course, though we admit it is the toilet paper that is cruelty to trees (often old growth trees)

The point is, that unless your diet is so dire as to be rated worth of superfunding cleanup, this is a lot of single use water to get through, and whether there is a resource of plausible personalized fertilizer there for the taking, we entirely shoot that choice through our selection of washing and cleaning products.

A bucket of bleach down the khazi will kill all known germs but won't go well as watering for your edible kitchen garden produce.

To clarify; while we may each choose to poison ourselves with toxic diet intake, it just may be that consequently we have to ensure that none of the resulting outgoing escapees ever evolve, and that they will never encounter life forms, such as the neighbours, in any form.

All and any of the household water, the baths, showers, clothes and dish washers, roof and wc follow and are so rendered sterile and 'safe'

Meanwhile, using non toxic washing and cleaning products on our clothes, utensils and selves, excluding wc for the sake of the point, others may send their water direct to garden produce watering or storage for later usage for this It does imply enthusiasm and investment in gardening though, probably preferring this lifestyle activity, as with diet, for cost or health

Housing designed to support interests in these might be laid out to exploit and use efficiently those vital resources such as water, light, warmth, and food, as well as providing shelter - and privacy to rest and grow ourselves.

However, if we don't consider our diets as garbage in, we are hardly likely to enthuse about regularly departing aliens as garbage out or as resources we can't live without, that is to say, lunch is already history and as with history best it be gone before it won't go.

Justin Rowlatt, Pen Hadow and Lewis G Pugh - U2/Bono all get massive publicity via the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú airwaves.

Almost without exception their projects founder on ill conceived concepts about man made production of Carbon Dioxide and how to "Save the Planet" by their feeble efforts. Saving all 3%!!!! U2/Bono is pure political hot air [4% exhaled CO2]. Pugh paddled for posterity and got precisely nowhere - too much ice! Hadow is dragging his radar sled over ice that is at or near the average it was in the late 70's/90's period.
justin Rowlatt is just a sad sack of self sustaining bulls**t.

Maybe the esoteric surnames evoke off the wall ideas.

Hi,

It is a sensible thing to keep human urine and faeces separate from liquid wastes which contain heavy metals and other material you don't want on a field. The separation has been technically solved without loss of comfort.
The big question is: Is the world ready for this or not?
I wrote my PhD-Thesis on the use of urine as fertiliser. If you are interested have a look at:

You can download the full text form there.
Andreas

People are misunderstanding what composting human-manure is about. What Mr. Jenkins has advocated (in his book at least) is collecting all the feces and urine from one's household and composting them with plant matter on one's property. With minimal effort, sterilization temperatures and competition destroy all pathogens. If you're worried about safety, let the compost sit for a couple of years, or use it for fertilizing trees and ornamentals. Pharmaceuticals and hormones are biodegradable, and given the microbial diversity and activity of a compost pile, are likely rapidly destroyed.

Dealing with sewage is an entirely different matter. Sewage is all of the waste discharged into water from both commercial and residential areas. Therefore it tends to contain all sorts of toxins and heavy metals, which should never be applied to agricultural land or discharged into bodies of water (or put anywhere for that matter). The fertilizer value of human excretions is lost due to contamination from the other constituents of sewage.

The spreading of night-soil is also problematic, as uncomposted humanure can contain and spread pathogens to food or water sources.

Urban populations with no gardens could have some sort of sealed toilet bins that they put out with the garbage and recycling once a week.

Urinating and deficating into water - especially potable water - is a totally wasteful method of dealing with human excretion. Our disgust for our own body functions renders a potential resource into a huge problem.

Joe's idea is not technically new, but he has developed a new twist. He worked out the carbon:nitrogen ratio to cause the compost to heat up to over 140 deg. F which eliminates pathogens. This is very different than spreading "night soil" on fields and the compost heats up by itself, so it doesn't require any additional energy. You're not even supposed to turn it. I used the sawdust bucket system myself for almost 10 years with no ill effects.

everyone says good idea but! It would be easier to sell without the humor but a more practical view coupled with that the product has to compete with others in the market.

Fair do's but if you're selling a fertilizer that is safe do you want to put people off telling them where it's come from? No secret but we don't advertise the fact. That will put the less fundamental more at ease don't you think? sometimes the salesman has to pander to the sensibilities of the client.

If you're producing a kilo a day you're eating a kilo a day. And you aren't thinking, you're selling people back their own poo? We can happily accept horse manure on the roses even if it reeks for a few days but there are limits.

That's probably why for some it's not a popular idea that is catching on fast.

If you can really persaude people that it's keeping their rivers and environment clean maybe they will accept it but big names aren't going to give overt endorsement. Tact rather than brash confrontation might sell the idea better.

whehther the technology has been commercialised successfully or not.May be discussed in detail,if successful.

China has been utlising all animal waste including human for centuries. Every farm has a methane producer that provides gas for cooking etc and waste used as fertiliser. However this is only suitable for animals that are housed at night.
I prefer more effort be put into solar and domestic sized fuel cell as most families dont produce enough animal waste.