Last month’s excerpt was from Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things by John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning. If you like it, you’re welcome to borrow the book to learn more, or you can purchase it from the publisher, Sightline Institute directly.

COMPUTERS

Arriving at work, I sat down at my desk and turned on my computer to check my e-mail. As I cooked off from my ride, the computer warmed up. Its screen flashed the growing number of kilobytes of memory available. But it said nothing about how many kilograms of stuff or kilowatts of energy it was using.

Electricity – A 150-watt current of electricity, enough to power two incandescent light bulbs, had brought the computer to life. The United States owes 40 percent of the world’s 300 million computers. Computers take 5 percent of the electricity used in American offices. In comparison, lighting uses 20-25 percent. A gun inside my monitor sent a beam of electrons across the 20-inch display, lighting colored phosphors on the inside of the screen and a precise pattern of pixels on the outside: I had no e-mail. The display consumed about as much power as the rest of the computer’s components combined. A “screen saver” popped up on my screen after a few minutes, but the images of swimming tropical fish saved no electricity: my monitor used as much power as ever. Most of the time personal computers are turned on, they are not actually being used. In addition, one-third of computers in the United States are left on at night and on the weekends.

Electricity in Seattle might come from anywhere on “the grid,” the complex network of power plants and transmission lines that keeps a constant flow of electrons available from all over the western United States and beyond. But my computer was probably powered by a hydroelectric dam blocking a Northwest salmon stream, and most likely of all, eastern Washington’s Grand Coulee Damn, the Northwest’s largest generator of electricity. When completed in 1941, Grand Coulee walled off 1,000 miles of salmon habitat in the upped Columbia River and exterminated North America’s largest salmon, the legendary “June hogs,” Chinooks more than five fee long and weighing 100 pounds or more. Dams have blocked more than one-third of all salmon habitat in the seven-state and one-province Columbia Basin.

Chips – The beige computer that stare at me 40 hours a week consist of about 55 pounds of plastics, metals, glass, and silicon. But the heart of this fantastically intricate machine is one-fiftieth of a pound of silicon and metal formed into integrated circuits, also known as semiconductors, or simply chips.

Though the chips weigh next to nothing, making them generated more waste than making any other part of my computer. The 400-step process of making chips and covering them with millions of microscopic electrical switches began with silica mined in Washington. Silica, or silicon dioxide, the basic ingredient of sand, is the most abundant substance in the Earth’s crust. The silica was heated with carbon in an Oregon plant to form carbon monoxide and 98% pure silicon. This silicon was heated with hydrochloric acid, then with hydrogen gas, and cooled to form a “hyper pure” silicon rod eight inches across. The crystalline rod was sliced into wafers less than a millimeter thick, and these were ground and chemically polished to a mirror like shine and trucked to the chip manufacturer in California’s Silicon Valley.

The chip factory, called a wafer fab, stretched longer than two football fields and housed equipment manufactured by more than 100 companies around the world. My computer’s chips – one wafer’s worth – were made in “clean rooms,” where only one to five particles were present in each cubic foot of air and workers wore gowns, booties, and gloves to avoid contaminated the wafers. In contrast, hospital operating rooms have 10,000 to 100,000 particles per cubic foot; outside air contains 500,000 to 1 million particles. Keeping these rooms particle free required pumping the inside air through special filters that removed fine particles. But the filters did not remove solvent vapors, some of which were toxic, from the air the workers breathed.

My silicon wafer was cleaned with acid, and then heated to form a protective surface layer of silicon dioxide. Workers looking through microscopes used ultraviolet light, light-sensitive chemicals, chemical developers, patterned masks, and some of the most precise machinery ever invented to etch a pattern of minute circuits across the wafer. Further etching created holes in which high-energy machines planted phosphorus and boron, which would eventually carry electricity through my finished chips. Each of these stapes was repeated several times, and after most of the steps, the chips were chemically or mechanically cleaned.

Producing the chips in my computer generated 89 pounds of waster – 4,500 times the chips’ own weight! – and used 2,800 gallons of water. State-of-the-art wafer fabs could have made the same chips, allowing me to do all the same computer tasks, with less than half the waste.

Paper-thin layers of Arizona copper were applied to each chips surface, chemically etched (to create the wiring connection the chip’s circuits), cleaned, and then oxidized for insulation. Machines applied an even thinner layer of gold to the back of each chip. After more chemical cleaning, a ship carried my wafer to Malaysia in a box of unbleached Oregon Douglas-fir pulp with shock-absorbing inserts of black polypropylene foam from Japan. The shippers would reuse the box and the foam inserts six times before recycling them.

Chip Packages – In a factory operating around the clock near Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian workers earning about $2 an hour and Japanese robots running on coal-fired electricity cut my wafer into hundreds of individual chips and assembled them into “packages.” Each package consisted of a chip, frame, wires, and plastic housing. The packages enabled the chip to be wired to the rest of my computers.

Face-masked, gloved workers glued each chip to an etched copper frame, ran tiny wires of South African gold between the frame and the chip, and molded a plastic compound around the package. Because gold is so expensive, almost none is wasted. But because it is so expensive, gold miners can profitably mine ores that have less than one part per million of gold, leaving behind huge piles of mineral waste contaminated with toxic metals and cyanide used to extract the gold.

Circuit Boards – My completed chip packages were shipped back to the United States. There my computer manufacturer inserted them into printed circuit boards in the disk drives, keyboard, and other devices, as well as into the “motherboard,” the main circuit board on which most internal components are mounted. I once watched a technician open up my computer to add more memory and was fascinated by the maze of boards with tiny solderlike wires zigzagging throughout like the streets of a miniature city. How unnerving, though, to rely so heavily on a piece of equipment whose workings I have little hope of understanding.

A Texas factory made my circuit boards. Their manufacturer used more chemicals, energy and water, and generated more hazardous waste, than the making of any other part of my computer. Machines cut boards made of copper, fiberglass, and epoxy resin to size, drilled holes in them, and cleaned them. In a process not unlike making chips, the holes were plated with a thin layer of copper and the boards etched with circuit patterns. This process generated airborne particulates, acid fumes, VOCs, and other chemical waste.

Then the boards were plated with layers of copper and of tin-lead solder. The tin was imported from Brazil, and the lead was recovered from dead car batteries in Houston. Recycled lead meets 0 percent of the U.S. demand annually. The United States consumes half the world’s lead, mostly for car parts. Because lead is highly toxic and hard to dispose of legally, 90 percent of car batteries are recycled after use. Yet lead waste from electronic goods is almost never recycled. Scattered throughout the computer, lead solder is costly to recycle.

Etching and cleaning left behind a pattern of copper wiring on the circuit boards. Assembling and soldering the boards also produced lead, copper, VOCs, and solvent wastes.

Monitors – When I use my computer, I don’t see the chips, chip packages, and circuit boards hard at work on the inside. All I pay attention to is what appears on the screen – the wide end of a cathode-ray tube (CRT), a vacuum tube made of glass with electron guns at the far end, Like almost all computer monitors sold in the United States, my CRT was made in Japan. A manufacturer in Osaka used various chemicals and ultraviolet light to etch a minute pattern of black stripes and then red, green, and blue phosphors on the glass for my monitor’s front panel. Every color I see on my screen is actually a combination of these three colors.

The sides of the CRT were soldered to the front panel with lead oxide and heated, fusing the parts together to form a bulb. Discarded color monitors are classified a hazardous waste because of lead in the glass. By the year 2005, about 15 million personal computers will have been sent to landfills in the United States. They will occupy about 300 million cubic feet; equivalent to a football field stacked a mile high in computer trash.

Ships, planes, and trucks brought the various computer components to the California plant where they were assembled. The finished computer was carefully boxed with polystyrene foam inserts and trucked to a suburban super store. I ordered it over the phone; a delivery truck brought it to my office.

In all, the factories making my 55-pound computer generated 139 pounds of waste and used 7,300 gallons of water and 2,300 kilowatt-hours of energy (about one-fourth the energy the computer would use over its four-year lifetime). State-of-the-art factories could have made the same computer with half to two-thirds less waste. And different companies – with flat-panel displays (like those in laptop computers) instead of today’s big vacuum tube monitors, for example – could have been made with even less waste.

The computer industry thrives of the rapid adoption of new technologies and resists change much less than older industries. If nudged by governments and consumers, the computer industry could apply its technical expertise toward cleaning up its own act – and fast.

I stepped out to grab some lunch. I left my computer on.

WHAT TO DO?!

· Print less often. Send e-mail instead of faxes, and print on scrap paper when you can.

· Turn off your computer, or at least your screen, whenever you’re not using it.

· Choose the most power-saving settings in your computer’s setup. Look for EPA’s Energy Star logo if you buy new equipment.

· If you need to upgrade your computer, have new memory or circuit boards added rather than replacing the whole thing.

· If you need a new computer altogether, refurbish a used one or buy a laptop, before buying a new desktop. Laptop computers weigh about one-tenth as much as desktop computers and require about one-third the electricity.

July’s Excerpt from our Lending Library is from Toby Hemingway’s Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture published here with permission by Chelsea Green Publishing.

The Many Roles of a Tree

As I’ve said, when we look at a plant, we often see it as doing one thing. Take the hypothetical white oak I referred to above. Some homeowner placed that tree in the backyard to create a shady spot. But even this single tree, isolated in a lawn, is giving a rich performance, not simply acting as a leafy umbrella. Let’s watch this oak tree to see what it’s doing.

It’s dawn. The first rays of the sunlight strike the canopy of the oak but most of the energy in these beams is consumed in evaporating dew on the leaves. Only after the leaves are dry does the sunlight warm the air within the tree. Above the oak, however, the air has begun to hear, and a cloud of just awakened insects swirls here. Below the canopy, it’s still too chilly for insects to venture. The insects roil in a narrow band, sharply defining the layer of warm air above the tree. Together the sun and the oak have created insect habitat, and with it, a place for birds, who quickly swoop to feast on the swarm of bugs.

In the cool shade of this tree, snow remains late into the spring, long after unprotected snow has melted. Soil near the tree stays moist, watering both the oak and nearby plantings, and helping to keep a nearby creek flowing (early miners in the West frequently reported creeks disappearing once they’d cut nearby forests for mine timbers).

Soon the sun warms the humid, night-chilled air within the tree. The entrapped air dries, its moisture escaping to the sky to help form clouds. This lost moisture is quickly replaced by the transpiring leaves, which pump water up from the roots and exhale it through puffy-lipped pores in the leaves called stomata. Groundwater, whether polluted or clean, is filtered by the tree and exits through the leaves as pure water. So trees are excellent water purifiers, and active ones. A full-grown tree can transpire 2,000 gallons of water on a hot, dry day. But this moisture doesn’t just go away – it soon returns as rain: Up to half of the rainfall over forested land comes from the trees themselves (the rest arrives as evaporation from bodies of water). Cut the trees, the rain disappears.

Sun striking the leaves ignites the engines of photosynthesis, and from these green factories, oxygen streams into the air. But more benefits exist. To build sugars and the other carbon-based molecules that provide fuel and structure for the tree, the leaves remove carbon dioxide from the air. This is how trees help reduce the level of greenhouse gases.

As the leaves absorb sunlight and warm the air within the tree, this hot, moist air rises and mixes with the drier, cool air above. Convection currents begin to churn, and morning breezes begin. So trees help create cooling winds.

But closer to the ground, trees block the wind. The oak’s upper branches toss in the morning breeze, while down below the air is still. The tree has captured the energetic movement of the air and converted it into its own motion. Where does this energy go? Some scientists think that captured wind energy is converted into the woody tissue o the tree, helping to build tough but flexible cells. Trees make excellent windbreaks. A tree placed on the windward side of a house can substantially reduce heating bills.

The morning breeze carries dust from the plowed fields of nearby farmland, which collects on the oak leaves. A single tree may have 10 to 30 acres of leaf surface, all able to draw dust and pollutants from the air. Air passing through the tree is thus purified, and humidified as well. As air passes through the tree, it picks up moisture exhaled from the leaves, a light burden of pollen grains, a fine mist of small molecules produced by the tree, some bacteria, and fungal spores.

Some of those spores have landed below the tree, spawning several species of fungus that grow symbiotically amid the roots, secreting nutrients and antibiotics that feed and protect the tree. A vole has tunneled into the soft earth beneath the tree in search of some of this fungus. Later this vole will leave manure pellets near other oaks, inoculating them with the beneficial fungus. That is, if the owl who regularly frequents this oak doesn’t snatch up the vole first.

The tree’s ancestors provided Native Americans with flour made from acorns, though most suburbanites wouldn’t consider this use. Now, blue jays and squirrels frolic in the oak, snatching acorns and hiding them around this and neighboring yards. Some of these acorns, forgotten, will sprout and grow into new trees. Meanwhile, the animals’ diggings and droppings will aid the soil. Other birds probe the bark for insects, and yet others depend on the inconspicuous flowers for food.

Later in the day, clouds (half of them created by trees, remember) begin to build. Rain droplets readily form around the bacteria, pollen, and other microscopic debris lofted from the oak. These small particles provide the nucleation sites that raindrops need to form. Thus, trees act as “cloud-seeders” to bring rain.

As the rain falls, the droplets smack against the oak leaves and spread out in the a fine film, coating the entire tree (all 10 to 30 acres of leaves, plus the branches and trunk) before a single drop strikes the ground. This thin film begins to evaporate even as the rain falls, further delaying any through-fall. Mosses and lichens on this old oak soak up even more of the rain. We’ve all seen dry patches beneath trees after a rain: A mature tree can absorb over ¼ inch of rain before any reaches the earth; even more if the air is dry and the rain is light.

The leaves and branches act as a funnel, channeling much of the rain to the trunk and toward the root zone of the tree. Soil close to the trunk can receive two to ten times as much rain as that in open ground. And the tree’s shade slows evaporation, preserving this moisture.

As the rain continues, droplets leak off the leaves and splatter on the ground. Since this tree-drip has lost most of the energy it gathered during its fall from the clouds, little soil erodes beneath the tree. Leaf litter and roots also help hold the soil in place. Trees are supreme erosion-control systems.

The water falling from the leaves is very different from what fell from the sky. Its passage through the tree transmutes it into a rich soup, laden with the pollen, dust, bird and insect droppings, bacteria and fungi collected by the leaves, and many chemicals and nutrients secreted by the tree. This nutritious broth both nourishes the soil beneath the tree and inoculates the leaf litter and earth with soil-decomposing organisms. In this way, the tree collects and prepares its own fertilizer solution.

The rain eases toward sundown, and the sky clears. The upper leaves of the tree begin to chill as night falls, and cold air drains down from the canopy, cooling the trunk and soil. But this chill is countered by heat rising from the day-warmed earth, which warms the air under the tree. The leafy canopy holds this warmth, preventing it from escaping to the night sky. So nighttime temperatures are warming beneath the tree than in the open.

The leaves, however, radiate their heat to the sky and become quite cold, often much colder than the air. All these cold surfaces condense moisture from the air, and the resulting dew drips from the leaves and wets the ground, watering the tree and surrounding plants. Leaves can also gather moisture from fog: On foggy days the mist collects in such volume that droplets trickle steadily from the leaves. On arid bug foggy coasts, tree-harvested precipitation can be triple the average rainfall. By harvesting dew and fog, trees can boost available moisture to far beyond what a rain gauge indicates.

As we gaze at this huge oak, remember that we are only seeing half of it. At least 50 percent of this tree’s mass is below the ground. The roots may extend tens of feet down, and horizontally can range far beyond the span of the tree’s branches. We’ve already learned how these roots loosen and aerate soil, build humus as they grow and die, etch minerals free from rocks with mild acid secretions, and with sugary exudates provide food for hundreds or even thousands of species of soil organisms that live with them.

Roots bring nutrients from deep in the ground, and the tree converts them into leaves. When these leaves drop in the fall, carbon and minerals gathered from the immense volume of air and earth surrounding the tree are concentrated into a thin layer of mulch. Thus, the tree has harvested a diffuse dusting of useful nutrients, once sprinkled over thousands of cubic yards of soil and air, and distilled them into a rich, dense agglutination of topsoil. In this way, trees mine the sparse ores that surround them and build fertility and wealth. This wealth is shared with many other species, which root and burrow, feed and build, all nourished by the tree’s gatherings.

But there is more: This tree’s roots have threaded toward those of nearby oak trees and then fused with them. A tree’s roots, researches have shown, can graft with those of its kind nearby, exchanging nutrients and even notifying each other of insect attack. Chemical signals released by an infested tree prompt its neighbor to secrete protective compounds that will repulse the soon-to-invade bugs. If an oak has grafted to its neighbor, does it remain an individual tree? Perhaps trees in a forest are more like branches from a single subterranean “tree” than a group of individuals.

The ways in which a single tree interacts with other species and its environment, then, are many. I’ve barely mentioned the swarms of insects that this oak supports: gall wasps and their hymenopteran relatives, beetles who tunnel into twigs and bark, and all manner of sucking and chewing bugs and their many insect predators. Then there are the birds who feed on these bugs. And we shouldn’t forget the myriad nearly plants that benefit from the rain and nutrients collected by this tree.

Through this tree, we glimpse the benefits of ecological thinking. Instead of viewing a tree simple as something that looks nice or provides a single offering such as apples or shade, we can now begin to see how deeply connected a tree is to its surroundings, both living and inanimate. A tree transforms wind and sunlight into a variety of daily-changing microclimates, harvests nutrients, builds soil, pumps and purifies air and water, creates and concentrates rain, and shelters and feeds wildlife and microbes. Add to all this the better known benefits for people: fruit or nuts, shade, climbing and other fun for kids, and the beauty of foliage, flowers or form. We start to see how tightly enmeshed is a simple tree with all the other elements in a landscape. Now we can begin to imagine the richness of a landscape of many plant species, all interconnected by flows of energy and nutrients, nurturing and being nourished by the animals and microbes that flap and crawl and tunnel among them.

Each plant modifies its environment. These changes in turn support or inhibit what lies nearby, whether living or not. Recognizing that plants don’t stand alone can radically affect the way we place the features of our gardens.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, please consider borrowing it from our Lending Library or the San Francisco Public Library, or purchase it directly from Chelsea Green Publishing by going to Chelsea Green.

3rd Edition: a guide to composting human manure by Joseph Jenkins - Chelsea Green Publishing

An edited excerpt taken from chapter two, Waste Not, Want Not…

“WASTE: …Spoil or destruction, done or permitted, to lands, houses, gardens, trees, or other corporeal hereditaments, by the tenant thereof…Any unlawful act or omission of duty on the part of the tenant which results in permanent injury to the inheritance…” Black’s Law Dictionary

America is not only a land of industry and commerce, it’s also a land of consumption and waste, producing between 12 and 14 billion tons of waste annually. Much of our waste consists of organic material including food residues, municipal leaves, yard materials, agricultural residues, and human and livestock manures, all of which should be returned to the soil from which they originated. These organic materials are very valuable agriculturally, a fact well known among organic gardeners and farmers.

Feces and urine are examples of natural, beneficial, organic materials excreted by the bodies of animals after completing their digestive processes. They are only “waste” when we discard them. When recycled, they are resources, and are often referred to as manures, but never as waste, by the people who do the recycling.

We do not recycle waste. It’s a common semantic error to say that waste is, can be, or should be recycled. Resource materials are recycled, but waste is never recycled. That’s why it’s called “waste.” Waste is any material that is discarded and has no further use. We humans have been so wasteful for so long that the concept of waste elimination is foreign to us. Yet, it is an important concept.

When a potato is peeled, the peels aren’t kitchen waste – they’re still potato peels. When they’re collected for composting, they are being recycled and no waste is produced. Composting professionals sometimes refer to recycled materials as “waste.” Many of the people who are developing municipal composting programs came from the waste management field, a field in which refuse has always been termed “waste.” Today, however, the use of the term “waste” to describe recycled materials is an unpleasant semantic habit that must be abandoned. Otherwise, one could refer to leaves in the autumn as “tree waste,” because they are no longer needed by the tree and are discarded. Yet, when one walks into the forest, where does one see waste? The answer is “nowhere,” because the forest’s organic material is recycled naturally, and no waste is created. Ironically, leaves and grass clippings are referred to as “yard waste” by some compost professionals, another example of the persistent waste mentality plaguing our culture.

One organism’s excrement is another’s food. Everything is recycled in natural systems, thereby eliminating waste. Humans create waste because we insist on ignoring the natural systems upon which we depend. We are so adept at doing so that we take waste for granted and have given the word a prominent place in our vocabulary. We have kitchen “waste,” garden “waste,” agricultural “waste,” human “waste,” municipal “waste,” “biowaste,” and on and on. Yet, our long-term survival requires us to learn to live in harmony with our planet. This also requires that we understand natural cycles and incorporate them into our day-to-day lives. In essence, this means that we humans must attempt to eliminate waste altogether. As we progressively eliminate waste from our living habits, we can also progressively eliminate the word “waste” from our vocabulary.

“Human waste” is a term that has traditionally been used to refer to human excrements, particularly fecal material and urine, which are by-products of the human digestive system. When discarded, as they usually are, these materials are colloquially known as human waste, but when recycled for agricultural purposes, they’re known by various names, including night soil when applied raw to fields in Asia.

Humanure, unlike human waste, is not waste at all – it is an organic resource material rich in soil nutrients. Humanure originated from the soil and can be quite readily returned to the soil, especially if converted to humus through the composting process.

Human waste (discarded feces and urine), on the other hand, creates significant environmental problems, provides a route of transmission for disease, and deprives humanity of valuable soil fertility. It’s also one of the primary ingredients in sewage, and is largely responsible for much of the world’s water pollution.

A clear distinction must be drawn between humanure and sewage because they are two very different things. Sewage can include waste from many sources – industries, hospitals and garages, for example. Sewage can also contain a host of contaminants such as industrial chemicals, heavy metals, oil and grease, among others. Humanure, on the other hand, is strictly human fecal material and urine.

What, in truth, is human waste? Human waste is garbage, cigarette butts, plastic six-pack rings, Styrofoam clamshell burger boxes, deodorant cans, disposable diapers, worn out appliances, unrecycled pop bottles, wasted newspapers, junk car tires, spent batteries, junk mail, nuclear contamination, food packaging, shrink wrap, toxic chemical dumps, exhaust emissions, discarded plastic CD disks, the five billion gallons of drinking water we flush down our toilets every day, and the millions of tons of organic material discarded into the environment year after year after year.

SOILED WATER

The world is divided into two categories of people: those who shit in their drinking water supplies and those who don’t. We in the western world are in the former class. We defecate into water, usually purified drinking water. After polluting the water with our excrements, we flush the polluted water “away,” meaning we probably don’t know where it goes, nor do we care. Every time we flush a toilet, we launch five or six gallons of polluted water out into the world.¹² That would be like defecating into a five-gallon office water jug and then dumping it out before anyone could drink any of it. Then doing the same thing when urinating. Then doing it everyday, numerous times, and then multiplying that by about 290 million people in the United States alone.

Even after the contaminated water is treated in wastewater treatment plants, it may still be polluted with excessive levels of nitrates, chlorine, pharmaceutical drugs, industrial chemicals, detergents, and other pollutants. This “treated” water is discharged directly into the environment. The use of antibiotics is so widespread that many people are now breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria in their intestinal systems. These bacteria are excreted into toilets and make their way to wastewater treatment plants where the antibiotic resistance can be transferred to other bacteria. Wastewater plants can then become breeding grounds for resistant bacteria, which are discharged into the environment through effluent drains. Why not just chlorinate the water before discharging it? It usually is chlorinated beforehand, but research has shown that chlorine seems to increase bacterial resistance to some antibiotics.¹⁹

Here’s something else to chew on: 50 to 90% of the pharmaceutical drugs people ingest can be excreted down the toilet and out into the waterways in their original or biologically active forms. Furthermore, drugs that have been partially degraded before excretion can be converted to their original active form by environmental chemical reactions. Pharmaceutical drugs such as chemotherapy drugs, antibiotics, antiseptics, beta-blockers heart drugs, hormones, analgesics, cholesterol-lowering drugs and drugs for regulating blood lipids have turned up in such places as tap water, groundwater beneath sewage treatment plants, lake water, rivers, and in drinking water aquifers. Think about that the next time you fill your glass with water.²⁰
Long Island Sound receives over a billion gallons of treated sewage every day - the waste of eight million people. So much nitrogen was being discharged into the Sound from the treated wastewater that it caused the aquatic oxygen to disappear, rendering the marine environment unsuitable for the fish that normally live there. The twelve treatment plants that were to be completed along the Sound by 1996 were expected to remove 5,000 pounds of nitrogen daily. Nitrogen is normally a soil nutrient and agricultural resource, but instead, when flushed, it becomes a dangerous water pollutant.²¹ On December 31, 1991, the disposal of U.S. sewage sludge into the ocean was banned. Before that, much of the sewage sludge along coastal cities in the United States had simply been dumped out to sea.
The discharging of sludge, sewage, or wastewater into nature’s waterways invariably creates pollution. The impacts of polluted water are far-reaching, causing the deaths of 25 million people each year, three-fifths of them children.²² Half of all people in developing countries suffer from diseases associated with poor water supply and sanitation.²³ Diarrhea, a disease associated with polluted water, kills six million children each year in developing countries, and contributes to the deaths of up to 18 million people.²⁴ At the beginning of the 21st century, one out of four people in the developing countries still lacked clean water, and two out of three lacked adequate sanitation.²⁵

Proper sanitation is defined by the World Health Organization as any excreta disposal facility that interrupts the transmission of fecal contaminants to humans.²⁶ This definition should be expanded to included excreta recycling facilities. Compost toilet systems are now becoming internationally recognized as constituting “proper sanitation,” and are becoming more and more attractive throughout the world due to their relatively low cost when compared to waterborne waste systems and centralized sewers. In fact, compost toilet systems yield a dividend - humus, which allows such a sanitation system to yield a net profit, rather than being a constant financial drain (non pun intended). The obsession with flush toilets throughout the world is causing the problems of international sanitation to remain unresolved. Many parts of the world cannot afford expensive and water consumptive waste disposal facilities.

We’re also depleting our water supplies, and flushing toilets is one way it’s being wasted. Of 143 countries ranked for per capita water usage by the World Resources Institute, America came in at #2 using 188 gallons per person per day (Bahrain was #1).²⁷ By some estimates, it takes one to two thousand tons of water to flush one ton of human waste.³⁰ Not surprisingly, the use of groundwater in the United States exceeds replacement rates by 21 billion gallons a day.³¹

WASTE VS. MANURE

By dumping soil nutrients down the toilet, we increase our need for synthetic chemical fertilizers. Today, pollution from agriculture, caused from siltation (erosion) and nutrient runoff due to excessive or incorrect use of fertilizers,³² is now the “largest diffuse source of water pollution” in our rivers, lakes, and streams.³³ Chemical fertilizers provide a quick fix of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium for impoverished soils. However, it’s estimated that 25-85% of chemical nitrogen applied to soil and 15-20% of the phosphorous and potassium are lost to leaching, which pollutes groundwater.³⁴

This pollution shows up in small ponds, which become choked with algae as a result of the unnatural influx of nutrients. From 1950 to 1990, the global consumption of artificial fertilizers rose by 1000%, from 14 million tons to 140 million tons.³⁵ Nitrate pollution from excessive artificial fertilizer use is now one of the most serious water pollution problems in Europe and North America. Nitrate pollution can cause cancer and even brain damage or death in infants.³⁶ All the while, hundreds of millions of tons of compostable organic materials are generated in the U.S. each year, and either buried in landfills, incinerated, or discharged into the environment as waste.
The squandering of our water resources, and pollution from sewage and synthetic fertilizers, results in part from the belief that humanure and food scraps are waste materials rather than recyclable natural resources. There is, however, an alternative. Humanure can undergo a process of bacterial digestion and then be returned to the soil. This process is usually known as composting. This is the missing link in the human nutrient recycling process.

Raw humanure carries with it a significant potential for danger in the form of disease pathogens. These diseases, such as intestinal parasites, hepatitis, cholera and typhoid are destroyed by composting, either when the retention time is adequate in a low temperature compost pile, or when the composting process generates internal, biological heat, which can kill pathogens in a matter of minutes.

Raw applications of humanure to fields are not hygienically safe and can assist in the spread of various diseases. Americans who have traveled to Asia tell of the “horrible stench” of night soil that wafts through the air when it is applied to fields. For these reasons, it is imperative the humanure always be composted before agricultural application. Proper composting destroys possible pathogens and results in a pleasant-smelling material.

On the other hand, raw night soil applications to fields in Asia do return humanure to the land, thereby recovering a valuable resource, which is then used to produce food for humans. Cities in China, South Korea, and Japan recycle night soil around their perimeters in greenbelts where vegetables are grown. Shanghai, China, a city with a population of 14,2 million people in 2000,³⁹ produces an exportable surplus of vegetables in this manner.

RECYCLING HUMANURE

Humanure can be naturally recycled by feeding it to the organisms that crave it as food. These voracious creatures have been around for millions, and theoretically, billions of years. They’ve patiently waited for us humans to discover them. Mother Nature has seeded our excrements, as well as our garbage, with these “friends in small places,” who will convert our organic discards into a soil-building material right before your eyes. Invisible helpers, these creatures are too small to be seen by the human eye and are therefore called microorganisms. The process of feeding organic material to these microorganisms in the presence of oxygen is called composting. Proper composting ensures the destruction of potential human pathogens (disease-causing microorganisms) in humanure. Composting also converts the humanure into a new, benign, pleasant-smelling and beneficial substance called humus, which is then returned to the soil to enrich it and enhance plant growth.

Incidentally, all animal manures benefit from composting, as today’s farmers are now discovering. Composted manures don’t leach like raw manures do. Instead, compost helps hold nutrients in soil systems. Composted manures also reduce plant disease and insect damage and allow for better nutrient management on farms. In fact, two tons of compost will yield far more benefits than five tons of manure.⁴²

Human manure can be mixed with other organic materials from human activity such as kitchen and food scraps, grass clippings, leaves, garden refuse, paper products and sawdust. This mix of materials is necessary for proper composting to take place, and it will yield a soil additive suitable for food gardens as well as for agriculture.
One reason we humans have not “fed” our excrement to the appropriate organisms is because we didn’t know they existed. We’ve only learned to see and understand microscopic creatures in our recent past. We also haven’t had such a rapidly growing human population in the past, nor have we been faced with the dire environmental problems that threaten our species today like buzzards circling a dying animal.

It all adds up to the fact that the human species must inevitably evolve. Evolution means change, and change is often resisted as old habits die hard. Flush toilets and bulging garbage cans represent well entrenched habits that must be rethought and reinvented. It we humans are half as intelligent as we thing we are, we’ll eventually get our act together. In the meantime, we’re realizing that nature holds many of the keys we need to unlock the door to a sustainable, harmonious existence on this planet. Composting is one of those keys, but it has only been relatively recently discovered by the human race. Its utilization is now beginning to mushroom worldwide.

To read the rest of this riveting and informative book, please check it out of our lending library!

References

12 – Golden, Jack, et. Al (1979) The Environmental Impact Data Book. Ann Arbor, MI: Ann Arbor Science Publishers, Inc., p. 495.

19 – Wastewater Microbiology, p. 86.

20 – Ralof, Janet. (1998 March 21). “Drugged Waters – Does it Matter that Pharmaceuticals are Turning Up in Water Supplies?” Science News, Vol. 153 (No. 12), p. 187-189.

21 – State of the New England Environment. (1996) Preserving New England Natural Resources. http://www.epa.gov/region01/soe/coastal.html.

22 – Toward Organic Security: Environmental Restoration or the Arms Race?. Peace and Environment Platform Project, c/o World Citizens Assembly, Suite 506, 312 Sutter St., San Francisco, CA 94018.

23 – Vital Signs 1998, p. 156.

24 – Courier. (1985, January). UNESCO. 7 Place de Fentenoy, 75700 Paris, France.

25 – State of the World 1999, p. 137.

26 – Vital Signs 1998, p. 156.

27 – Gever, John, et al. (1986). Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades. A Summary Report. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing Co.

30 – The Waste of Nations, p. xxiv.

31 – 1993 Information Please Environmental Almanac, p. 340-341.

32 – Environmental Reporter. (1992 April 24) p. 2877-78.

33 – State of the World 1998, p. 100.

34 – Sides, S. (1991, August/September). “Compost.” Mother Earth News, Issue 127, p. 50.

35 – Brown, Lester R., et al. (1998). Vital Signs 1998. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., p. 44-45.

36 – Vital Signs, p. 44.

39 – State of the World 1999, p. 135.

42 – Cannon, Charles A. (1997 September 3-5). “Life Cycle Analysis and Sustainability Moving Beyond the Three R’s – Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle – to P2R2 – Preserve, Purify, Restore and Remediate.” In E.I. Stentiford (Ed.), Proceedings of the 1997 Organic Recovery and Biological Treatment International Conference. Harrogate, UK, p. 252-253. Available from Stuart Brown, National Compost Development Association, PO Box 4, Grassington, North Yorkshire, BD23 5UR UK (stuartbrown@compuserve.com)