Composting vs Anything Into Oil

[Guest guest]

Heidi-

>Well, I'm with you on composting. But a lot of stuff doesn't

>compost ... plastics would be FIRST on my list to turn back into

>oil.

Well, OK, stuff that started life as oil should obviously be recycled into

oil. We have unbelievably vast amounts of waste plastic that desperately

need to be recovered.

>Sewage too ... it composts, but it has toxins in it that you

>don't want back on the land

Sewage, though, isn't something I'm so sure we should give up on so

easily. Some of it, obviously, is basically industrial waste, and probably

makes a nice candidate for AIO, but while I don't know what the current

costs and technical feasibility prospects are, it just seems like a really,

really bad idea to me to give up on recycling human waste into soil

fertility. As of 1994, we were losing about 12,000 pounds of soil per acre

per year from wind and water erosion of U.S. land farmed with large-scale

techniques, according to the Department of Agriculture. 6 tons PER ACRE.

Now, just to come up with a really rough Fermi estimate for contrast, say

we have 280 million people in the country. Say each person produces 1

pound of stools per day (a somewhat conservative estimate, according to

http://pearl.sums.ac.ir/AIM/0034/asl0034.html) and that, when composted,

each pound is reduced to a quarter its original weight. (In my experience,

volume reduction varies pretty widely depending on what's composted with

the manure, and I know volume and weight don't equate, but I'm trying to be

very conservative in my guesstimation.) Say further that you could only

recover a maximum of half of that human waste for composting -- meaning 140

million pounds per day, yielding 35 million pounds of compost per

day. That composted human manure would allow us to completely replace the

soil lost on just over 1 million acres every single year.

I can't seem to find a figure for the total amount of land under

cultivation in this country, but a million acres has to be an appreciable

portion, and that's just from a portion of human waste alone. There's tons

of other stuff to compost.

Of course, add to that the fact that we should be using something like

biointensive, biodynamic agriculture, which actually builds soil and soil

fertility, and recycling and composting everything we can, and the picture

would improve a lot, but that's besides my main point, which is that it

would seem to me like detoxifying human waste isn't an insurmountable

problem. I haven't looked into the humanure crowd's literature, but my

understanding is that they address the issue.

>And any organics that people

>are " afraid " to compost (you can compost a BSE cow, but

>people won't want to, I think).

So burn it and put the ash into the compost. It's still better than

essentially destroying it in its entirety.

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