Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, flamebait comments, and ideological battle comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly. We've asked you to stop many times over many years.
At some point, we're going to have to stop cutting you all this slack and ban you. I don't want to ban you, because you also post good comments. But the damage caused by your bad comments is not ok, and we need you to take care of this.
Jokes aside, last year an algae bloom in Tampa bay killed mega-tons of sea life, dolphins, sea turtles, Goliath groupers, and all.
And the neurotoxin that does the damage also harms people!
For a little perspective, Tampa bay still hasn't recovered from the last red tide event in 2017 which is evident by the specific fishing regulations implemented for the area.
I found a study recently that points to the Mississippi river as one of the main contributors to the red tide. The extra nutrients that are coming down the river and going into the gulf is the problem.
… but seriously, this astonished me. Would love to see the rough calculation behind this. My biochemistry isn’t nearly good enough to begin to replicate this estimate.
Regardless of the biochem possibilities I wonder about the engineering realities required to collect, isolate, purify, and distribute the urea and other nitrogen rich compounds from the waste stream.
On a theoretical level, all these fertilizers get added just so the soil doesn't get depleted by what gets driven away to the field and eaten by city-dwelling humans, so it kind of makes sense that they get delivered to our bodies and then expelled.
The origin of this phrase (I am certain you know and merely detailing for others) is literally in the once-financially-viable business of collecting urine (from public houses, outdoor toilets, and even private houses) because it was a valuable source of ammonia before the invention of the (from memory, Haber-Bosch?) process for its industrial production.
It was notable that it was more than just "viable", but seriously protected (by nobility) because that ammonia was needed (and a limiting factor in) the production of gunpowder - hence it was a matter of security.
The end of that article is kind of sad because it details the reasons these very effective low-tech sewage treatment methods are being phased out, and they are some of the same systemic problems that are preventing climate action worldwide:
- low cost of fossil fuels (due to negative externalities) driving out sustainable alternatives
- global speculation on real estate / urban sprawl
- inadequate regulation of destructive activities
Everything will have to change for our civilization to continue in the face of the climate crisis, we must rethink every system our lifestyle relies upon, sewers included.
This is a great article. I didn't know about the urine-trap toilet (discussed about half-way through). It's a very elegant idea that adds very little complexity to the conventional toilet. Dare I say a solution that finally isn't full of sh*t?
> That’s in part because urine is rich in nutrients that, instead of polluting water bodies, could go towards fertilizing crops or feed into industrial processes.
Huh? We're already producing way too much fertilizer from farm animals, which leads to the situation that countries like the Netherlands [1] and Germany [2] experience a massive oversupply of dung that has to be shipped sometimes hundreds of kilometers because otherwise the fields near the dung sources get way too much nutrients or the dung runoff fucks up river ecosystems.
How about using what we actually have right now in abundance instead of building highly complex systems designed to capture tiny amounts of human urine?!
You jest, but I have thought about this. If we all take fiber pills and probiotics will that reduce waste, and also toilet paper consumption? Should we be introducing these things into the water supply like fluoride? (the answer is no, but would be an interesting exercise to see what impact it could have)
The "sugar in water" is not a problem, rather a symptom: it is a very effective and cheap way to get calories into a human.
Way too many people lack a combination of access to fresh groceries (they live in "food deserts" [1]), enough money to afford these groceries [2], enough time to cook healthy food [3], or skills to cook food [4] - and most often these issues collide in poor and otherwise disadvantaged people... which again are at the highest risk of malnutrition, obesity and associated other health problems.
The thing to tackle is poverty because it sits at the root of all of these issues, not making sugary drinks more expensive - all this does is punish the poor people yet again for being poor!
You’re conflating a bunch of separate concerns. You’re saying that people are drinking soda because they need cheap calories and can’t get them because they live in food deserts and are in poverty and somehow are obese despite insufficient calories. This all does not make sense.
Soda is not cheap. A 2-liter bottle of Coca Cola contains 900 calories of corn syrup and costs $2 at my nearest Walmart. For the same $2, you can buy a 4lb bag of sugar and get 3400 calories if you don’t care that your calories are coming from sugar.
If you want something that at least kind of looks like food you could get 1200 calories of Chips Ahoy cookies for that $2 and while that’s not good for you, it’s gotta be better for you than soda. $2 will also get you about 1200 calories of Wonder bread or Great Value granola. Or $2 will get you a whopping 1500 calories of Kraft Mac and Cheese. Soda is a shitty deal in terms of calories. Even milk costs less per calorie than Coca Cola. And don’t tell me poor people are mostly buying off-brand cola because it’s not rich people making Coca Cola billions. (And it doesn’t change much because I was mostly comparing equivalent brands. You can get calories from Walmart-branded bread as cheaply as you can from Walmart-branded soda.)
People buy soda because it’s tasty, convenient, and widely advertised, not because it’s cheap calories.
Obese people are also not in need of more calories so the idea that they are turning to soda because they need cheap calories doesn’t make a bit of sense.
> The thing to tackle is poverty because it sits at the root of all of these issues, not making sugary drinks more expensive - all this does is punish the poor people yet again for being poor!
These are orthogonal. You can “tackle poverty” and also make soda expensive. This isn’t punishing people for being poor. It’s placing a tax on a very unhealthy habit to make it less appealing, exactly as we do for cigarettes.
This argument might be compelling if people actually needed soda for the calories, but they don’t.
> skills to cook food [4]
This is an odd choice of article. It says literally nothing about poverty or why poor people don’t cook. It’s just some random survey of adults who say they don’t cook and only 23% of them said it was because they don’t know how anyway. Of those, there is some unknown overlap with the 51% who say their spouse does all the cooking and undoubtedly some overlap with other groups such the group who live at home with their parents and the group who have enough money to always eat out.
That's because most pet food is unhealthy crap - the worst offender is food that has sugar added for optics/smell reasons or grains because they are cheaper than meat. Healthy food for pets stinks and looks bad, so manufacturers add sugar that the humans keep on buying it.
On top of that, most pets don't get nearly the amount of movement they need - their owners don't have the time to take their dog on the two to three hours (!) a day that energetic, former work dog breeds need, or they are being kept solitary... if there is one thing that adopting a pair of kittens has taught me it is that they contain absurd amounts of energy that they burn through playing, and solitary cats can't release it.
>If we all take fiber pills and probiotics will that reduce waste, and also toilet paper consumption?
The problems I see are unintended consequences [0] of the policy. Perverse results could include additional environmental costs to producing and delivering fiber pills and probiotics (there would still be costs if added to the water). Unexpected drawbacks could include side effects from the fiber and probiotics delivered in this way (especially for people with unusual gut microbiomes, or defects in the production of fiber and probiotic supplements), and civil unrest from people who oppose the mandatory additions to the tap water (which may ultimately result in changes in the nation's political power).
> If we all take fiber pills and probiotics will that reduce waste
Fiber pills do not reduce waste. They increase it. That is the point of fiber. It increases stool. Fiber is also known as “bulk”.
> Should we be introducing these things into the water supply like fluoride?
This is like asking if we should put protein into the water supply. You can’t just dump a bunch of psyllium husk into the water supply. It won’t make it through the water supply and come out of the tap on customers’ homes. It will just gunk up the city pipes, pumps, etc.
If it did somehow work it would make the water supply disgusting to drink and unusable for many domestic purposes.
> has to be shipped sometimes hundreds of kilometers
That's not very far, we used to ship guano halfway around the world. We don't produce near enough manure to fertilize all of our fields. Certainly we should use the manure we do produce, but it certainly isn't close to enough.
The complete insane thing from the Netherlands is is that almost 25% of the drilled up gas beneath Groningen, and is causing earthquakes on a regular basis, is actually used to create fertiliser from. As far as I understand that is done because the yield from synthetic fertiliser is higher than from animal dung so unless I’m missing something we’re actually trying to get rid of a lot of the dung by exporting it as well. Though I’m not entirely sure what happens with all the excess dung. I believe most of the organic dung is not yielding enough to be economically feasible and thus gets exported.
It's probably worth pointing out that the component that's overabundant in the Netherlands (nitrogen) is only part of what can be recovered from urine. In particular there's a chronic lack of phosphorus.
If what you are proposing is to dump it in the natural areas, this is not a valid idea.
Not all ecosystems admit an excess of nitrogen. Many rare species of wildflowers would be quickly replaced by nettles, elder and other common species and vanish.
>According to Simha’s estimates, humans produce enough urine to replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers worldwide; it also contains potassium and many micronutrients (see ‘What’s in urine’). On top of that, not flushing urine down the drain could save vast amounts of water and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer systems.
>In a study[1] that modelled wastewater-management systems in three US states, she and her colleagues compared conventional wastewater systems with hypothetical ones that divert urine and use the recovered nutrients to replace synthetic fertilizers*. They projected that communities with urine diversion could lower their overall greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 47%, energy consumption by up to 41%, freshwater use by about half, and nutrient pollution from the wastewater by up to 64%, depending on the technologies used.
That synthetic is the key. Replacing it makes sense - but why replace current wastewater systems at an enormous price tag with "tech magic" when we could simply use existing supplies of animal dung?
> and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer systems.
ETA: Actually, sewer systems are more strained by not enough wastewater flowing through them - they were designed to the load of many decades ago, prior to the invention of water-saving toilets, showers and other appliances. Now, there is not enough water let in, and the sewage doesn't get swept away - the result is smelly [1].
I don't see how that addresses the GP's key point about the cost of replacing wastewater systems in literally every household. If I imagine, say, replacing all the walls in every house with modern insulated walls, windows with double-pane glass, roofs with solar panels, etc, a variety of environmental and economic objectives can be achieved. With regard to the very shiny "up to 47%" reduction in GHGE, this appears to be relative to the wastewater system, not the economy as a whole:
>Urine diversion consistently provides improved environmental performance
relative to the conventional system for each scenario for all
impact categories, except AP, as shown in Figure 2 (see Table
S17 for data plotted in this figure). Both diversion alternatives
reduced the GWP, CED, freshwater use, and EP categories
from anywhere between 24 and 63%.
As a reality check, there are still tens of thousands of homes in the United States using lead pipes for drinking water. The current regulatory and economic climate has made it infeasible to replace infrastructure that literally poisons people. Any reform that proposes to alter the physical structure of the vast majority of existing residential buildings must necessarily be situated in the context of laws, costs and politics that define what is possible for those buildings, and compared in terms of realistic costs and impact to the scores of other proposals to do similar things.
This is a painful and depressing reality that anyone who has studied American urban development for more than a few months comes to understand.
At the end of the day, humans and animals are both part of a cycle of nutrient use and recycling those nutrients from waste, be that human waste or animal waste, is a way to cut down on synthetic fertilizer use.
Some bits from the USA [0] [1] [2] that y'all might find informative. Important part is that manure comes in different varieties and it's not all a 1:1 replacement for synthetics in the way farmers use them today.
Also of note is that, just like in Germany, parts of the USA that concentrate livestock have too much bull shit and that's bad for runoff from the livestock operations. But that's the expected result, ain't it? Concentrating feed from fields all over means you're concentrating what comes out of the animal also, which means you need to truck it off somewhere or end up with a local pollution problem.
One other upside of pursuing human waste streams is that we already have a lot of infrastructure in place to process human sewage. Have a look at [3] right here and you'll see the potential— but that's still less than half the phosphorous that Europe uses in the present day. Good news is that cutting back on fertilizer input doesn't result in a 1:1 linear reduction in cereal yields so a reduction in fertilizer availability (after the phosphates get mined out) doesn't necessarily lead to a bad famine.
These are complex systems here and there's no one-size-to-fit-them-all type solution.
According to [1], toilet usage accounts for ~24% of household water usage. The missing 26% to "about half" likely comes from removing the water usage caused by the production of synthetic fertilizer.
My understanding was not that we have too much manure, but that it's too concentrated. If it were more evenly distributed, it would not cause the same problems with downstream water etc.
Separating urine from the rest of sewage could mitigate some difficult environmental problems, but there are big obstacles to radically re-engineering one of the most basic aspects of life.
I briefly had a project called Pee on a Tree that got mocked and got no traction. This is why Earth is doomed: The simple solutions are derided while people overcomplicate things that don't have to be complicated.
Hoomans: Y'all fools deserve your fate and I shall say so in my dissertation for my degree in Human Studies when I get back to Vulcan.
I remember when Obama was roundly mocked for suggesting that people improve gas mileage by checking their tire pressure before road trips. Too easy and effective to be worthwhile, I guess.
Interesting, it looks like most of the liquid gets separated out early on in the process and released downstream(with processing???). Seems like a good opportunity to collect the pee part.
From my understanding, it's better for making biomethane if you separate them. The methane comes from feces, and bacteria digest parts of urine into ammonia, which slows down the bacteria that convert feces into methane.
> Using an inoculum acclimated to high ammonia concentrations was critical to successful biogas production at these high TAN concentrations.
That's what this part is talking about. They intentionally introduced bacteria that were tolerant of high ammonia levels to work around all the ammonia the urine gives off. The wild-type bacteria aren't tolerant of those levels of ammonia, and do a poor job of digesting the feces when mixed.
and where does the energy and fertilizer come from to do that? right, fossil fuels. Last I checked, there's a currently an existential threat linked to use of those that are the main driver for why all these initiatives are going on.
I'm not happy about it either but its a choice between each individual's footprint going down or reducing the amount of individuals.
What exactly is the existential threat? If population is at all time highs, if lifespans are at all time highs, if crop yields are at all time highs, if deaths from natural disasters are at all time lows, what is the existential threat?
well, lets see here.. its currently causing increased forest fires, rising sea levels, desertification, glaciers melting, destabilization of the sea currents, collapsing ecosystems.
DO I need to spell it out for you or are you willfully living under a rock?
> We could quite easily triple our food production if only those limits were lifted.
We don't actually even need to triple the production - depending on the country and crop, anything from 1/3rd to over 60% of production (!!!) is wasted [1].
This insanity has got to stop, and a lot of that waste in Western countries is caused by consumers wanting a 24/7-available selection of all kind of products in their nearest supermarket. And everyone who proposes solutions to that like requiring pre-ordering fresh meat and produce one day in advance (to curb the amount of what has to be thrown away at the end of each day) quickly gets branded a "communist" or comparisons with empty shelves in the former GDR/USSR crop up.
Additionally: It's one thing (and bad enough) if stores keep around a dozen brands of basic yogurt around as that stuff needs a time to expire and stores have got pretty good at keeping that loss minimal, but all that packaged fresh meat... :'(
Why does every discussion about overpopulation immediately devolve to food supply? I get that seems like the obvious thing to talk about, but the real world of supply chains and materials is far more complex than "food". It guaranteed that we can industrially produce far above our current population levels and we'll totally screw up the planet. How do I know?
Because of global warming and mass extinctions.
What overpopulation discussions miss and devolve to also is that it isn't important on the number of people, it is the RESOURCE RATE PER PERSON combined with POPULATION that produces the "are we sustainable".
What doesn't scare me is China and India's population. It's China and India's rapid climb to US-level lifestyles and per capita resource consumption rates.
Here's the most important thing we are not conserving/shows we are overextended:
I'm not just talking about the Amazon. The amount of space needed for HUMANS isn't important. The amount of space needed by NATURE very very very much is.
We drain all the swamps. We clear all the forest. We farm all the plains. We trawl the oceans.
This is the most stinging indictment of modern economics: what is the economic cost of destroying a natural habitat? It's not zero, in fact every single economic study will likely point out "well we could exploit this forest for human purposes and gain tax and GDP out of it".
That single failure, a TOTAL inability to quantify the economic value of a natural habitat in terms of sustaining the ecosystems, food webs, species proliferation/redundancy, production of oxygen/removal of CO2 isn't just going to kill us as a species, that's just garden variety extinction. It might kill the entire ecosystem and everything but single celled organisms.
Our developmental economics should STRONGLY prefer cities. A high rise apartment building should be far cheaper, so a 3000 sq ft apartment should be 1/3 the cost of a suburban 3000 sq ft house.
Meat ag is the problem. If everyone had piles of sausages, burgers. and steaks for every meal, food production would be incredibly difficult and expensive.
Alternately, there are a lot of things we can improve, and doing something small that's easily accomplished gets something done now, increases visibility, and add momentum to do bigger things. I know some states are banning (or limiting) plastic bags now.
Does that solve the big problems of container ships burning bunker fuel, oil wells leaking methane, and the huge amounts of plastic caused by drink companies? No, but it definitely makes them look worse, and adds pressure to help make bigger change.
Neither will you read the article, which is certainly not about water reclamation. (Other than the water saved by peeing into freshwater less.) Surely if it seems natural not to shit where we eat, it's reasonable to think about strategies not to piss where we drink - you seem eager enough to keep the two separate.
Dressed with visual splendor: your food will be synthetic; your home will be abstracted; your leaders bathetic, and your soul distracted. Material austerity is coming.
Please don't start flamewars on HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Edit: since your account is using HN primarily for ideological battle, I've banned it. We ban accounts that do that regardless of what they're battling for, because it's so destructive of the intended purpose of this site. Past explanations if anyone wants more:
The traditional thing is you mix urine with wood ash. This returns all the nutrient salts to the soil, and nitrogen.
My one concern is sodium accumulation. There are some thermal approaches based on solubility curves that sort of work. I'd also be interested in electrochemical and, ideally, biological approaches (can we use biological cell membranes and ion pumps instead of manufactured ones?).
Weighing difficulty against impact, this seems under-researched.
Drying urine, transporting it, this is extremely energy intensive. There's a much simpler solution: composting toilets. Easy to setup, requires very little input (basically just some dry material like wood shavings (i.e. waste from wood processing that you can sometimes get for free) and you're done. The "humanure" mixed with the dry material goes in a compost bin, sits there for two years, then can be applied to the local garden without any problem. If you have a vegetable/fruit garden you're actually closing a loop - giving back to your garden a good chunk of what it gave your body.
My wife and I rented a Yurt in Fort Collins, CO, near the foot hills of Wyoming. The owner was super eco-conscious/zero-waste. I've not camped for a while, and haven't used anything other than a toilet for years, but something about doing my business in the out house really made the experience 10x better. I think maybe because I feel guilt whenever I flush a toilet that says "3.5-5 gal/flush"... that's a lot of water. I'm not sure the owner used the "humanure", but regardless, it was one less flush.
One of the weird things about compost toilet is that septic systems exist. If you're on a well in Colorado, you pump up the water, do your business, filter the water through hundreds of feet of earth and then pump up the water again.
Probably not, the water will usually migrate quite a bit before hitting well depth, depending on underlying geology. Composting toilets are also useful in the mountains where septic systems need to be extremely deep or will freeze during the winter.
I do see the space for a septic system designed for rotation - ie that uses a pipe material designed to last X number of years that then itself biodegrades, and can be ploughed and the field used once a sufficient safety fallow period has passed.
They waterless separating toilets discussed by the article literally are composting toilets. The difference is they're proposing using the diverted urine to replace more energy-intensive commercial fertiliser production, rather than treating it as the less useful waste byproduct for people's gardens.
(That and they're acknowledging that people who haven't chosen composting toilets tend not to like them, because the separating takes some getting used to and if you don't separate urine from faeces the decomposition is much slower and smellier)
Composting toilets usually divert the urine and drain it separately (gray water? Garden?) because it makes the rest too wet for good aeration and decomposition.
what about contamination? urine is not always sterile upon elimination from the body, potentially bringing along bacterial, drug, and other contaminants.
The composting process destroys pathogens by several mechanisms. The first is heat: in the pile, thermophilic bacteria raise the temperature through their own biological heat, killing E. coli, Salmonella, etc. My current pile was 149F (65C) yesterday. In a compost pile, those temps will kill pathogens in less than an hour. As a general rule of thumb the following temps/times kill pathogens in compost piles: 140F/60C for 1 hour; 130F/54C for 1 day; 120F/49C for 1 week. To measure this, you get a compost thermometer from a garden store and keep it in the center of the pile at all times, year-round. (The thermometer also serves another function: it indicates the degree to which your pile is biologically active, providing hints about moisture, carbon, and nitrogen levels.) So heat is the first mechanism for killing pathogens. Another is competition: the pathogens are directly killed by other bacteria in the pile.
Once my compost bin is fully built, I let it sit for at least 1 year.
The only thing to be really concerned with is certain chemotherapy drugs. Some of them not only don't break down in a compost pile, but they can cause cancer in people who don't already have it.
The composting process is pretty amazing. It's vastly more hygienic than sewage (lol).
I would also worry a bit about accumulation of drugs like lithium and other contaminants like PFCs. My suspicion is long term closed loop use of toilet compost for food crops could result in unsafe levels of contamination, have you done any research that direction?
I don't know about lithium in compost, but in general, composting breaks down many pharmaceuticals (again, apart from certain chemo drugs). Composting does destroy some anti-cancer drugs like Salinomycin.
PFCs may accumulate almost regardless, although I assume composting helps. After all, composting can break down gasoline, diesel, and TNT - though of course you shouldn't add them to a compost bin! Quoting The Humanure Handbook (4th edition) page 115: "About half the sewage sludge (biosolids) produced in the USA is applied to land, providing a significant opportunity for contaminants to enter soil systems and to bioaccumulate over time..." And page 117: "For example, brominated fire retardants were still found at almost eight thousand times higher concentrations than background concentrations in soil samples twenty years after the last application of biosolids. In another study, fifteen out of nineteen pharmaceutical drugs were still present in soil six months after being irrigated with contaminated wastewater."
So PFC accumulation is already happening but not because of composting. It's happening because sewage sludge is being added to farm fields and new housing developments.
This is part of why I cook with clay (in solar cooking) and stainless steel on the stovetop. That way my nutrient loop (eat, excrete, compost, grow more food) has the absolute minimum of PFCs and other contaminants.
For more information, read chapter 10 of The Humanure Handbook (4th edition) by Joseph Jenkins.
Lithium I picked as it's a heavy metal that wouldn't break down per se, though maybe the form it would exist in post-compost would be plenty benign. The sewage sludge issue I'm unfortunately aware of and have been following due to this case:
In my area the majority of contamination is from firefighting foams, and I think in the Bay area there's also a lot in groundwater from semiconductor manufacturing. My understanding is the known way to remove PFCs from soil involves baking at very high temperatures (like 500C) which is impractical at any scale.
Hah, fair, it's actually light. I don't know to what degree it would get taken up by plants or other food organisms (chickens etc), but if it were then that could be a concern as it's a common medication and the net concentration could climb without removal.
These are all great points, however the issue with PFCs is that they are extremely nonreactive. Things like TNT, gasoline, and diesel are the exact opposite. Those compounds are reactive and quite easy to break apart.
Even so, there must be some sort of either precaution or processing steps that can be taken to minimize PFC concentration, although I don't quite know what they might be.
i can certainly believe that composting is amazing at dealing with all sorts of contaminants, but as @hedgehog sorta points to, i'd be worried that the sheer variety of contaminants you could get at a larger population level would present some significant unknown/unforeseeable risks. on a smaller scale, like a single family/household, i'd expect those risks would be more ascertainable and mitigatable.
It's all about the marketing. I can see it now. The title of that Nature's article should also be the name of the new Lady Gaga's world tour where everybody would be doing lots of nitrous oxide. Plus maybe drag racing as a sideshow so as to compensate the taste differences.
Seems like these systems assume only human urine will go into these storage systems. But in reality, people tend to flush more than just fecal matter, urine, and water down the drain.
In order to clean the toilet bowl, people will use highly poisonous cleaning solutions. How will these cleaning solutions mixed with the stored urine affect its usage as a fertilizer? Even if it is eventually dehydrated, wouldn’t some of the cleaning solution still be present?
What happens if you send other types of fluid down the “urine only” toilet or system (ie, blood, vomit)?
People will even flush drugs, dead pet fish, alcohol and other non-human waste products down the drain.
In theory, it sounds like a great way to reduce our carbon footprint. But if they are designing the system on the assumption that people are smart and will only use it as intended then it might actually cause the opposite effect.
> In order to clean the toilet bowl, people will use highly poisonous cleaning solutions. How will these cleaning solutions mixed with the stored urine affect its usage as a fertilizer? Even if it is eventually dehydrated, wouldn’t some of the cleaning solution still be present?
An interesting implication of that is that bacteria will break down parts of the urine into ammonia, and a little bit for feces but not as much.
If someone were to dump bleach into it, it might create chloramine gas. Emphasis on might there; I'm in no way qualified to evaluate that risk.
agreed! might be oversharing, but I've started this whole end-to-end process, since buying my house in a city. Going surprisingly well, surprisingly enjoyable.
No need to bring in outside fertilizer, not flushing hundreds of gallons of potable water per month into the sewer, and I get top-notch compost to use for growing veggies.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29212633 (Nov 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26418766 (March 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563542 (Dec 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22050749 (Jan 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356769 (July 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20350618 (July 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20054704 (May 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797087 (Dec 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18114166 (Oct 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18034335 (Sept 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17517586 (July 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577510 (June 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13970380 (March 2017)
At some point, we're going to have to stop cutting you all this slack and ban you. I don't want to ban you, because you also post good comments. But the damage caused by your bad comments is not ok, and we need you to take care of this.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
And the neurotoxin that does the damage also harms people!
For a little perspective, Tampa bay still hasn't recovered from the last red tide event in 2017 which is evident by the specific fishing regulations implemented for the area.
They have got to be taking the piss.
So worth the downvotes.
The origin of this phrase (I am certain you know and merely detailing for others) is literally in the once-financially-viable business of collecting urine (from public houses, outdoor toilets, and even private houses) because it was a valuable source of ammonia before the invention of the (from memory, Haber-Bosch?) process for its industrial production.
A related article from Low-Tech Magazine, published in 2010.
The end of that article is kind of sad because it details the reasons these very effective low-tech sewage treatment methods are being phased out, and they are some of the same systemic problems that are preventing climate action worldwide: - low cost of fossil fuels (due to negative externalities) driving out sustainable alternatives - global speculation on real estate / urban sprawl - inadequate regulation of destructive activities
Everything will have to change for our civilization to continue in the face of the climate crisis, we must rethink every system our lifestyle relies upon, sewers included.
Huh? We're already producing way too much fertilizer from farm animals, which leads to the situation that countries like the Netherlands [1] and Germany [2] experience a massive oversupply of dung that has to be shipped sometimes hundreds of kilometers because otherwise the fields near the dung sources get way too much nutrients or the dung runoff fucks up river ecosystems.
How about using what we actually have right now in abundance instead of building highly complex systems designed to capture tiny amounts of human urine?!
[1]: https://www.noord360.eu/2021/02/10/guelletourismus-warum-deu...
[2]: https://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/deutschland/drecksgeschae...
[1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/581149776
Absolutely not. Not all types of diets need fiber for your digestive system to function properly.
Way too many people lack a combination of access to fresh groceries (they live in "food deserts" [1]), enough money to afford these groceries [2], enough time to cook healthy food [3], or skills to cook food [4] - and most often these issues collide in poor and otherwise disadvantaged people... which again are at the highest risk of malnutrition, obesity and associated other health problems.
The thing to tackle is poverty because it sits at the root of all of these issues, not making sugary drinks more expensive - all this does is punish the poor people yet again for being poor!
[1]: https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-deserts
[2]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/hunger/
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-multiple-jobs...
[4]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cooking-survey_n_955600
If you split soda into water and candy, then at least candy intake is visible and controllable.
Soda is not cheap. A 2-liter bottle of Coca Cola contains 900 calories of corn syrup and costs $2 at my nearest Walmart. For the same $2, you can buy a 4lb bag of sugar and get 3400 calories if you don’t care that your calories are coming from sugar.
If you want something that at least kind of looks like food you could get 1200 calories of Chips Ahoy cookies for that $2 and while that’s not good for you, it’s gotta be better for you than soda. $2 will also get you about 1200 calories of Wonder bread or Great Value granola. Or $2 will get you a whopping 1500 calories of Kraft Mac and Cheese. Soda is a shitty deal in terms of calories. Even milk costs less per calorie than Coca Cola. And don’t tell me poor people are mostly buying off-brand cola because it’s not rich people making Coca Cola billions. (And it doesn’t change much because I was mostly comparing equivalent brands. You can get calories from Walmart-branded bread as cheaply as you can from Walmart-branded soda.)
People buy soda because it’s tasty, convenient, and widely advertised, not because it’s cheap calories.
Obese people are also not in need of more calories so the idea that they are turning to soda because they need cheap calories doesn’t make a bit of sense.
> The thing to tackle is poverty because it sits at the root of all of these issues, not making sugary drinks more expensive - all this does is punish the poor people yet again for being poor!
These are orthogonal. You can “tackle poverty” and also make soda expensive. This isn’t punishing people for being poor. It’s placing a tax on a very unhealthy habit to make it less appealing, exactly as we do for cigarettes.
This argument might be compelling if people actually needed soda for the calories, but they don’t.
> skills to cook food [4]
This is an odd choice of article. It says literally nothing about poverty or why poor people don’t cook. It’s just some random survey of adults who say they don’t cook and only 23% of them said it was because they don’t know how anyway. Of those, there is some unknown overlap with the 51% who say their spouse does all the cooking and undoubtedly some overlap with other groups such the group who live at home with their parents and the group who have enough money to always eat out.
That's because most pet food is unhealthy crap - the worst offender is food that has sugar added for optics/smell reasons or grains because they are cheaper than meat. Healthy food for pets stinks and looks bad, so manufacturers add sugar that the humans keep on buying it.
On top of that, most pets don't get nearly the amount of movement they need - their owners don't have the time to take their dog on the two to three hours (!) a day that energetic, former work dog breeds need, or they are being kept solitary... if there is one thing that adopting a pair of kittens has taught me it is that they contain absurd amounts of energy that they burn through playing, and solitary cats can't release it.
The problems I see are unintended consequences [0] of the policy. Perverse results could include additional environmental costs to producing and delivering fiber pills and probiotics (there would still be costs if added to the water). Unexpected drawbacks could include side effects from the fiber and probiotics delivered in this way (especially for people with unusual gut microbiomes, or defects in the production of fiber and probiotic supplements), and civil unrest from people who oppose the mandatory additions to the tap water (which may ultimately result in changes in the nation's political power).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences
Fiber pills do not reduce waste. They increase it. That is the point of fiber. It increases stool. Fiber is also known as “bulk”.
> Should we be introducing these things into the water supply like fluoride?
This is like asking if we should put protein into the water supply. You can’t just dump a bunch of psyllium husk into the water supply. It won’t make it through the water supply and come out of the tap on customers’ homes. It will just gunk up the city pipes, pumps, etc.
If it did somehow work it would make the water supply disgusting to drink and unusable for many domestic purposes.
That's not very far, we used to ship guano halfway around the world. We don't produce near enough manure to fertilize all of our fields. Certainly we should use the manure we do produce, but it certainly isn't close to enough.
Not all ecosystems admit an excess of nitrogen. Many rare species of wildflowers would be quickly replaced by nettles, elder and other common species and vanish.
>According to Simha’s estimates, humans produce enough urine to replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers worldwide; it also contains potassium and many micronutrients (see ‘What’s in urine’). On top of that, not flushing urine down the drain could save vast amounts of water and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer systems.
>In a study[1] that modelled wastewater-management systems in three US states, she and her colleagues compared conventional wastewater systems with hypothetical ones that divert urine and use the recovered nutrients to replace synthetic fertilizers*. They projected that communities with urine diversion could lower their overall greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 47%, energy consumption by up to 41%, freshwater use by about half, and nutrient pollution from the wastewater by up to 64%, depending on the technologies used.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&d...
That synthetic is the key. Replacing it makes sense - but why replace current wastewater systems at an enormous price tag with "tech magic" when we could simply use existing supplies of animal dung?
> and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer systems.
ETA: Actually, sewer systems are more strained by not enough wastewater flowing through them - they were designed to the load of many decades ago, prior to the invention of water-saving toilets, showers and other appliances. Now, there is not enough water let in, and the sewage doesn't get swept away - the result is smelly [1].
[1]: https://taz.de/Wasserverbrauch-in-Deutschland/!5032936/
>Urine diversion consistently provides improved environmental performance relative to the conventional system for each scenario for all impact categories, except AP, as shown in Figure 2 (see Table S17 for data plotted in this figure). Both diversion alternatives reduced the GWP, CED, freshwater use, and EP categories from anywhere between 24 and 63%.
As a reality check, there are still tens of thousands of homes in the United States using lead pipes for drinking water. The current regulatory and economic climate has made it infeasible to replace infrastructure that literally poisons people. Any reform that proposes to alter the physical structure of the vast majority of existing residential buildings must necessarily be situated in the context of laws, costs and politics that define what is possible for those buildings, and compared in terms of realistic costs and impact to the scores of other proposals to do similar things.
This is a painful and depressing reality that anyone who has studied American urban development for more than a few months comes to understand.
At the end of the day, humans and animals are both part of a cycle of nutrient use and recycling those nutrients from waste, be that human waste or animal waste, is a way to cut down on synthetic fertilizer use.
Some bits from the USA [0] [1] [2] that y'all might find informative. Important part is that manure comes in different varieties and it's not all a 1:1 replacement for synthetics in the way farmers use them today.
Also of note is that, just like in Germany, parts of the USA that concentrate livestock have too much bull shit and that's bad for runoff from the livestock operations. But that's the expected result, ain't it? Concentrating feed from fields all over means you're concentrating what comes out of the animal also, which means you need to truck it off somewhere or end up with a local pollution problem.
One other upside of pursuing human waste streams is that we already have a lot of infrastructure in place to process human sewage. Have a look at [3] right here and you'll see the potential— but that's still less than half the phosphorous that Europe uses in the present day. Good news is that cutting back on fertilizer input doesn't result in a 1:1 linear reduction in cereal yields so a reduction in fertilizer availability (after the phosphates get mined out) doesn't necessarily lead to a bad famine.
These are complex systems here and there's no one-size-to-fit-them-all type solution.
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/42731/16741_ap...
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/42731/16744_ap...
[2] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/documents...
[3] https://www.nweurope.eu/projects/project-search/phos4you-pho...
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water
I briefly had a project called Pee on a Tree that got mocked and got no traction. This is why Earth is doomed: The simple solutions are derided while people overcomplicate things that don't have to be complicated.
Hoomans: Y'all fools deserve your fate and I shall say so in my dissertation for my degree in Human Studies when I get back to Vulcan.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S097308261...
You Don't Know Shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiNiBZiR_uA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVGdmE4_h4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra47l7fihZU
> Using an inoculum acclimated to high ammonia concentrations was critical to successful biogas production at these high TAN concentrations.
That's what this part is talking about. They intentionally introduced bacteria that were tolerant of high ammonia levels to work around all the ammonia the urine gives off. The wild-type bacteria aren't tolerant of those levels of ammonia, and do a poor job of digesting the feces when mixed.
I'm not happy about it either but its a choice between each individual's footprint going down or reducing the amount of individuals.
DO I need to spell it out for you or are you willfully living under a rock?
We don't actually even need to triple the production - depending on the country and crop, anything from 1/3rd to over 60% of production (!!!) is wasted [1].
This insanity has got to stop, and a lot of that waste in Western countries is caused by consumers wanting a 24/7-available selection of all kind of products in their nearest supermarket. And everyone who proposes solutions to that like requiring pre-ordering fresh meat and produce one day in advance (to curb the amount of what has to be thrown away at the end of each day) quickly gets branded a "communist" or comparisons with empty shelves in the former GDR/USSR crop up.
Additionally: It's one thing (and bad enough) if stores keep around a dozen brands of basic yogurt around as that stuff needs a time to expire and stores have got pretty good at keeping that loss minimal, but all that packaged fresh meat... :'(
[1]: https://www.fao.org/platform-food-loss-waste/flw-data/en/
Why does every discussion about overpopulation immediately devolve to food supply? I get that seems like the obvious thing to talk about, but the real world of supply chains and materials is far more complex than "food". It guaranteed that we can industrially produce far above our current population levels and we'll totally screw up the planet. How do I know?
Because of global warming and mass extinctions.
What overpopulation discussions miss and devolve to also is that it isn't important on the number of people, it is the RESOURCE RATE PER PERSON combined with POPULATION that produces the "are we sustainable".
What doesn't scare me is China and India's population. It's China and India's rapid climb to US-level lifestyles and per capita resource consumption rates.
Here's the most important thing we are not conserving/shows we are overextended:
1) natural habitat destruction
2) everything else (water, metals, food, clean air)
I'm not just talking about the Amazon. The amount of space needed for HUMANS isn't important. The amount of space needed by NATURE very very very much is.
We drain all the swamps. We clear all the forest. We farm all the plains. We trawl the oceans.
This is the most stinging indictment of modern economics: what is the economic cost of destroying a natural habitat? It's not zero, in fact every single economic study will likely point out "well we could exploit this forest for human purposes and gain tax and GDP out of it".
That single failure, a TOTAL inability to quantify the economic value of a natural habitat in terms of sustaining the ecosystems, food webs, species proliferation/redundancy, production of oxygen/removal of CO2 isn't just going to kill us as a species, that's just garden variety extinction. It might kill the entire ecosystem and everything but single celled organisms.
Our developmental economics should STRONGLY prefer cities. A high rise apartment building should be far cheaper, so a 3000 sq ft apartment should be 1/3 the cost of a suburban 3000 sq ft house.
Does that solve the big problems of container ships burning bunker fuel, oil wells leaking methane, and the huge amounts of plastic caused by drink companies? No, but it definitely makes them look worse, and adds pressure to help make bigger change.
Edit: since your account is using HN primarily for ideological battle, I've banned it. We ban accounts that do that regardless of what they're battling for, because it's so destructive of the intended purpose of this site. Past explanations if anyone wants more:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
My one concern is sodium accumulation. There are some thermal approaches based on solubility curves that sort of work. I'd also be interested in electrochemical and, ideally, biological approaches (can we use biological cell membranes and ion pumps instead of manufactured ones?).
Weighing difficulty against impact, this seems under-researched.
I do see the space for a septic system designed for rotation - ie that uses a pipe material designed to last X number of years that then itself biodegrades, and can be ploughed and the field used once a sufficient safety fallow period has passed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(That and they're acknowledging that people who haven't chosen composting toilets tend not to like them, because the separating takes some getting used to and if you don't separate urine from faeces the decomposition is much slower and smellier)
Once my compost bin is fully built, I let it sit for at least 1 year.
The only thing to be really concerned with is certain chemotherapy drugs. Some of them not only don't break down in a compost pile, but they can cause cancer in people who don't already have it.
The composting process is pretty amazing. It's vastly more hygienic than sewage (lol).
PFCs may accumulate almost regardless, although I assume composting helps. After all, composting can break down gasoline, diesel, and TNT - though of course you shouldn't add them to a compost bin! Quoting The Humanure Handbook (4th edition) page 115: "About half the sewage sludge (biosolids) produced in the USA is applied to land, providing a significant opportunity for contaminants to enter soil systems and to bioaccumulate over time..." And page 117: "For example, brominated fire retardants were still found at almost eight thousand times higher concentrations than background concentrations in soil samples twenty years after the last application of biosolids. In another study, fifteen out of nineteen pharmaceutical drugs were still present in soil six months after being irrigated with contaminated wastewater."
So PFC accumulation is already happening but not because of composting. It's happening because sewage sludge is being added to farm fields and new housing developments.
This is part of why I cook with clay (in solar cooking) and stainless steel on the stovetop. That way my nutrient loop (eat, excrete, compost, grow more food) has the absolute minimum of PFCs and other contaminants.
For more information, read chapter 10 of The Humanure Handbook (4th edition) by Joseph Jenkins.
https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2022-02...
In my area the majority of contamination is from firefighting foams, and I think in the Bay area there's also a lot in groundwater from semiconductor manufacturing. My understanding is the known way to remove PFCs from soil involves baking at very high temperatures (like 500C) which is impractical at any scale.
Even so, there must be some sort of either precaution or processing steps that can be taken to minimize PFC concentration, although I don't quite know what they might be.
They proposed/demostrated a cycle that is basically
Shower -> indoor plants -> toilet -> outdoor plants
New Earthships capture more energy, water & food at lower cost https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVp5koAOu9M&t=1m45s
In order to clean the toilet bowl, people will use highly poisonous cleaning solutions. How will these cleaning solutions mixed with the stored urine affect its usage as a fertilizer? Even if it is eventually dehydrated, wouldn’t some of the cleaning solution still be present?
What happens if you send other types of fluid down the “urine only” toilet or system (ie, blood, vomit)?
People will even flush drugs, dead pet fish, alcohol and other non-human waste products down the drain.
In theory, it sounds like a great way to reduce our carbon footprint. But if they are designing the system on the assumption that people are smart and will only use it as intended then it might actually cause the opposite effect.
An interesting implication of that is that bacteria will break down parts of the urine into ammonia, and a little bit for feces but not as much.
If someone were to dump bleach into it, it might create chloramine gas. Emphasis on might there; I'm in no way qualified to evaluate that risk.
No need to bring in outside fertilizer, not flushing hundreds of gallons of potable water per month into the sewer, and I get top-notch compost to use for growing veggies.