When life was literally full of crap | Hacker News Reader

When life was literally full of crap

rootsofprogress.org

The automobile, today the scourge of the environment, heating the earth and blackening the buildings, was once hailed as the saviour of cities by bringing cleanliness and purity to roads and the air.

A century from now will our descendants be cursing batteries and silicon PV panels? I suspect so.

As they should be. Not that they aren’t meaningful stepping stones. But energy storage and delayed usage has inherent side effects, and a lot of modern solutions have a bill that will come due. And that’s not just the nature of the materials used, but also the economics of their disposal. We don’t have a depleted heavy metals disposal program, we have “recycling” programs that ship hazardous waste to human processing dumping grounds.

I once spent a couple weeks in a village so remote and underdeveloped, it was essentially in the Bronze Age. No electricity, no running water, only one primitive well, no mail service or any government presence at all, beyond the village chief. Poop was everywhere and inescapable, in a way I hadn’t prepared for.

Interesting. If I had the time and discipline I'd research and write on the revelation you revealed to me. I think the title of the book would be: "Shit. We weren't meant to live in cities."

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.

> 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.

I'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.

Even today, animal husbandry is 95% shit management.

We've just removed most of the human shit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com