This system, called Varcor, was designed by the Seattle engineering firm Sedron Technologies and is owned by the San Francisco–based company Generate Upcycle. Wastewater treatment plants across the country are using high heat, composting, and devices akin to pressure cookers to transform leftover biomass into rich fertilizers, mulches, and other soil additives with names like Bloom and TAGRO (short for "Tacoma Grow"). Some process the wastewater in a separate step to extract phosphorus—an essential plant nutrient and a common element in the human diet—and layer it to form round pellets, in a technique a bit like building pearls. This technology, developed by a St. Louis–based company called Ostara, creates a slow-release fertilizer that can be sold back to farmers.
"We love tackling the yuck factor head-on," says the CEO of Epic Cleantec, which transforms wastewater into clean water and a natural soil additive.
Even portable toilets can be vehicles for nutrient recovery, through nitrogen-capturing methods developed by "peecycling" groups like the Rich Earth Institute and Wasted in Vermont and by Sanitation360 AB in Sweden. Because our protein-rich diets contain abundant nitrogen, the element can be readily recycled from both urine and feces.
Making fertilizer from the nutrients that we and other animals excrete has a long and colorful history; for generations it helped Indigenous cultures around the world create exceptionally fertile soil. These systems fell out of favor in Western culture, but researchers and engineers have joined advocates in reframing feces, urine, and their ingredients as invaluable natural resources to reuse instead of waste products to burn or bury. Several companies are now showing how to safely scale up the transformation with energy-efficient technologies. "We love tackling the yuck factor head-on," says Aaron Tartakovsky, cofounder and CEO of Epic Cleantec, which uses a chemical reaction and heat to transform wastewater into clean water and a natural soil additive.
A recent review in the Journal of Environmental Management, in fact, touts wastewater treatment plants as "renewable biological nitrogen mines" that can supply the essential but expensive component from reclaimed sewage sludge at a time when many farmers are finding it harder to obtain. Sewage can, the authors conclude, "become an important raw material for the sustainable production of organic-mineral fertilizers from renewable resources available locally, with a low carbon footprint." Extracting nitrogen and phosphorus for reuse can also help remove those pollutants from the plants' outflow and reduce the amount of organic matter destined for landfills and manure lagoons, which store and manage huge concentrations of livestock waste. Reinserting ourselves into nature's recycling system, in other words, could help us meet the planet's growing food needs without unduly fouling the environment.
The Varcor system heats the incoming poop and separates it into solid matter and vapor. A process called mechanical vapor recompression allows the compressed steam to be reused as a heat source while the water and ammonia vapor are separated and distilled. The conveyor belt/dryer carries the remaining solids to the giant crepe-making spindles and then into a waiting truck below. The plant is now selling three to four truckloads of this dry fertilizer to farms every week. Stanley Janicki, chief revenue officer for Sedron Technologies, says several companies are also interested in using the ammonia product to make fertilizer instead of deriving it from fossil fuels.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 05, @05:43PM (6 children)
Regardless whether we *can* or not, the reason we *don't* do this is one of public health.
Lots and lots of pathogens come out in stool. Many of them can't be chemically sanitized, and rnany pathogens could survive you breaking down even the DNA of proteins that are excreted. (Example: when imbued with a _micro-RNA_ sequence, the human body produces a protein that the body outright attacks - the covid vaccine.) Using another animal's waste may be OK, as those pathogens are much less likely to cross interspecial boundaries, but using waste from a species to provide for the same species is a no-no.
Human waste to fertilize maize for cow feed, ok. Human waste to grow carrots for people, absolutely not. You wouldn't be able to do it at all safely unless you put the waste through an incinerator - and at that point the energy expenditure is likely much more than the raw elemental atoms that you'd get back out. (They specifically cite this as a negative in the summary.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 05, @06:19PM (5 children)
That may be an issue, but the real reason we don't do it is economic, simple math. Our system cannot function under conditions of abundance.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 05, @11:31PM (4 children)
Because the conditions of abundance don't yet exist. We get this argument all the time. If we pretended X was true, then X would be true.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 05, @11:45PM (3 children)
Of course they do.. It's just that most of it goes into the landfills or up in smoke. Gotta keep prices up somehow
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 06, @03:55PM (2 children)
Modestly less waste or burning stuff won't get you abundance of resources.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06, @10:06PM (1 child)
:-) Yeah, leave it to you to modestly reduce waste to prove a false point.
You definitely do have a strong antisocial personality disorder
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday January 06, @11:55PM
It would need to be false first in order to be a false point. Here, the conceit that we would have "conditions of abundance" if we didn't waste so much is contrary to historical experience. As stuff becomes more abundant, we have had less reason to efficiently use t. Electricity is a classic example. It gets used now for massively lighting up cities, labor saving devices (human labor didn't become abundant!), and today's esoteric uses of cryptocurrencies and AI model processing. Technically, we could do these things more efficiently or not at all, but we would be modestly saving a plentiful resource at the cost of much more costly things: human time and progress.
Because disagreement is a sign of mental illness? Sure.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by organgtool on Sunday January 05, @07:22PM (3 children)
On the one hand, it seems completely wasteful to let all of the unused nutrients go without any attempt to reuse them. On the other hand, our waste contains so many chemicals from pharmaceuticals as well as PFAS that I'm skeptical we'd be able to clean our poop well enough to make it suitable for growing crops for food. If anything, maybe limit the use of this manure to certain land and limit the use of that land for non-food crops, such as ones used for ethanol. But even that may be dangerous as the harmful chemicals could leach into the groundwater and cause all sorts of other issues.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday January 05, @09:37PM (2 children)
How about wood? Another novel idea would be the various oils that are unhealthy for humans like seed oils, those could be converted into biodiesel.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 05, @09:52PM
And turn vaxxines into mercury thermometers to prevent teh AIDS.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Sunday January 05, @10:27PM
The biggest issue preventing widespread adoption I can see is that most municipal waste water systems, which is where most human waste goes, are not generally going to be setup to extract the waste before it's mixed with all the other intake into sewage processing plants like rainwater run-off and other grey water - quite literally watering it down. For more rural systems where you're going into a septic tank though this seems like it could be a much more feasible alternative if it can be made as easy to install and manage as a septic tank.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BlueCoffee on Sunday January 05, @08:27PM (3 children)
This topic about spreading human feces on crops comes up ever few years....
Making fertilizer from the nutrients that we and other animals excrete has a long and colorful history; for generations it helped Indigenous cultures around the world create exceptionally fertile soil. These systems fell out of favor in Western culture
Wong! It's untrue that Western Cultures don't use animal waste. Ever hear of manure? Today they still spread cow, pig, and chicken manure on their fields in the fall or on summer fallow. Farmers not using their animal waste is like farmers not using their own well water.
Western societies, and probably all other modern areas of the world, stopped spreading human waste on fields for a reason, and the reason is to prevent to spread of deadly diseases like typhus, cholera, deadly parasites like giardia & hookworm, and numerous viruses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 05, @10:57PM (2 children)
You're not really wrong, but a year of composting will easily get rid of almost any pathogen. The bigger concern nowadays is that pharmaceuticals don't always degrade as quickly and nicely as biological waste.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday January 06, @02:30AM (1 child)
Ahem.
https://www.jabfm.org/content/25/5/734 [jabfm.org]
Composted sources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5896421/ [nih.gov]
And a bit more speculative,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468584423000314 [sciencedirect.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06, @05:31PM
Soil and compost are not really the same thing in this regard. Manure fermented at high temperatures for long periods is very different from manure spread without composting (even if that manure has been sitting under an outhouse for a few seasons, that's not at all the same as exothermic composting). Vermicomposted manure is also very different from spreading raw manure.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 05, @11:03PM
I certainly wouldn't be Vegan.
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Sunday January 05, @11:05PM
...this will be completely necessary. For his planned one-way trip the that planet, I suggest Elon Musk immediately begin eating shit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 06, @12:22AM (1 child)
Milwaukee did this for decades until the brewing waste disappeared when the breweries went out of business
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Monday January 06, @05:14AM
They're still producing milorganite. It's from the wastewater treatment plant, not the brewery.
From https://www.milorganite.com/what-is-milorganite [milorganite.com],
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Monday January 06, @08:35AM
there have been many cultures over the Millennia since agriculture became a thing that have used Human and animal solid waste as fertilizer for their crops. When Human wastes are run through the same composting as animal wastes and the high temperatures involved in the kill off most pathogens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil [wikipedia.org]
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday January 06, @05:38PM
Manure has always been used in farming, as has urine. Back in the day it and garbage were the only fertilizers.
My mom once wondered why the grass grew faster under the tree. It was because that's where the dog pissed, and urine supplies phosphorus. Farmers pay good money for phosphorus.
A man legally forbidden from possessing a firearm is in charge of America's nuclear arsenal. Have a nice day.