NYC Sends “Poop Train” to Small Alabama Town, Where It’s Been Stuck for Months

Human poop is by abitrary fractions, grease, plant fiber, bacterial biomass, ph imbalanced water and table scraps.

Processing plants deal with that, plus everything else people dump down the drain, or what fits without clogging during heavy rain.

The only reason the human excrement is not completely liquified is because digestive tracts are sensitive living membranes, and not chemical distillation vats.

Industrial processing is capable of leveling off the organic waste into salts with enough chemical action, and the grease can be processed through saponification. Our guts aren't capable of hydrolysis, over-boiling organic material until it's transformed and destroyed, or incinerating the waste in situ, but given that NYC has been dealing with the output of millions of toilets for over a hundred years, a brute force option like carting by train seems like a brainless, unsophisticated hack.

How does there come to be such an overflow that trains are the only option? It makes sense to me that porta-potties get handled in their own way, and if that's all this is, then I can see what happened. But if processing demands outstripped the capacity of on site management operations, I'd be interested to learn how that happened, and what leads to those conditions.

I'd figure big cities, like New York, all have had better infrastructure than this since at least the 1950's, when more options for advancing technologies appeared on the table.

These digester eggs presumably do more than just skim and filter purified water for recirculation:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/environmental_education/dig...