TIL you produce about three and a half metric tons of feces and 38 000 liters of urine during an average lifetime.
TIL you produce about three and a half metric tons of feces and 38 000 liters of urine during an average lifetime.
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You realize every other time it rains in NYC, they dump raw sewage into the ocean and there's an uptick in people who get sick (swimmers) as a result?
Almost every major city in the US has this problem.
So I must disagree. I don't think it would be worse than our current situation.
Also, we currently fertilize food crops with cow manure, which also carries pathogens. These pathogens could be also eliminated by composting too, but I don't think anyone does this. This is usually the cause of e-coli and salmonia outbreaks in the US.
What I'm proposing is safer than the status quo
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Perhaps I'm just not understanding you, but how does composting treated sewage fix the problem of dumping raw sewage into the water before it ever reaches the treatment plant?
The reason for the dumping of raw sewage is because these cities have older infrastructure which combines wastewater and storm water collection into one system. Heavy rains can increase the flow rate in such systems by as much as ten times their usual rate, which is far too much for treatment plants to handle without massively oversizing them and it also could make them lose the microbiology that treats the wastewater for them. Diverting this sewage directly into the receiving waters actually prevents even worse public health problems from occurring.
Another problem with what you are proposing is that, while composting can be good enough to get rid of pathogens, it's not good enough to remove things like pharmaceuticals and heavy metals. Incineration would be a more effective solution, but it requires even higher upfront costs.
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If we don't put human waste into water, we don't have this problem. Is that not clear?
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Of course it is, but what's your method to achieving that goal and what does composting human waste have to do with it?
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I don't understand why this isnt clear to you. If you compost it, it solves that problem.
My city already collects my kitchen scraps waste for compost. This would just be another waste collection system that would virtually eliminate clean water issues caused by human feces
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The composting part is relatively easy, it's the collection system that I'm having the problem with. I mean, the way you're describing it now almost makes it sound like you want people to poop directly into buckets and hand it off to their neighborhood compost collection service. If all you're proposing is that Congress gives more money to city governments to upgrade their outdated systems more quickly, then that's perfectly fine with me, it just comes across to me more like wishful thinking than an actual plan.
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Safer, maybe. But it's crappy work.
I'll leave...
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89 comments