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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Futurology
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I mean, an urban environment flushes tons of fertilizer down the drain every day...
Human waste is not suitable for fertilizer.
Human waste could be used. It requires more processing to keep it safe, however.
There is also the complecating factor of chemicals. Night soil needs relatively little work. Toilet cleaner, however, needs more processing.
It's currently nowhere close to viable to do in a city environment, that could be changed in future.
/nightsoil has entered the chatYou should probably look up how most of your rice and beans are grown overseas.
See my other replies to this person.
It's not about the feasibility, but about the suitability.
I think a lot of people saw Matt Damon growing potatoes in human shit and thought it was legit and not specific to non-earth soil.
Of course it is. Or do you really think, cow and pig manure is fundamentally different from our shit?
The only difference are some germs, but that can be handled - otherwise water treatment plants would cause epidemics downstream.
It most definitely is not.
https://www.fda.gov/media/117422/download https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil
I believe some small pilot programs in EU allowed specific types of TREATED sewage to be used, but that's a whole different thing.
So your argument against treated waste is, that it has to be treated first?
I certainly didn't create the FDA, USDA, or medical science. Doesn't have anything to do with me.
If you want to take a chance on it, go for it, but seems a lot of people who specialize in the field all say you're wrong.
No, and if you would actually read the sources or dare to think for a few seconds you'd see that.
Human waste is not spent uranium that kills for millions of years with no way to mitigate that. If that would be the case, we would literally be drowning in shit right now.
Human feces contain some bacteria that can be dangerous, but that can be dealt with - again, this is exactly what every water treatment plant is doing. What do you think happens with all our shit? Do you think we fling it into space?
We entomb it in massive concrete caskets with a volume up to 5 000m², lined with plastic to prevent leaking, and when it's full we cap it and bury it under 3 meters of dirt.
It used to be around 1-2m wide clay bowls that were filled halfway and there was a variety of methods to cap it off. The reason for famines and things like the black death were people who just buried it in dirt, the cursed crap leeched out.