The World is Drowning in Poop
According to an article at Slate.com, the world has been wasting our nutrient-rich poop for years, burying or burning much of it, so the nutrients would go to, well, waste. Because our bodies don’t use all the nutrients we consume, valuable minerals like phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium go down the toilet, and while this nutrient-rich wastewater is sterilized before it’s released back into nature, the nutrients are still there, and are responsible for algae blooms in the nation’s waterways. Meanwhile, farmers have to buy fertilizer for their depleted farms.
But help is on the way! Thanks to a challenge grant, cities, private companies, and engineers have been studying the issue of what to do with all this poop.
Listek, a company from Canada, transforms human waste into manure, while a company in New York is using wastewater to make methane for natural gas. Meanwhile, the city of Washington D.C. has developed a process for separating poop and liquid waste, and after putting the solids through a composting process, sells the result to local farmers as organic fertilizer.