This is something I believe in.  Flushing toilets are unsustainable.


Poo can save the planet -From correspondents in New Delhi
October 17, 2007 09:22am

A CHEAP system to recycle human waste into bio-gas and fertiliser may allow 2.6 billion people in the world access to toilets and reduce global warming, an Indian environmental expert says.

Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, said his group planned to push the system at the seventh annual World Toilet Summit, to be held in New Delhi at the end of October.

The organisation is dedicated to providing toilets to nearly 730 million people in India who lack them.

"The Millennium Development Goals set in South Africa in 2002 aim by 2015 to cut by half the 2.6 billion people worldwide who lack toilets and provide them to all by 2025,'' Mr Pathak said at a briefing ahead of the summit.

He said India's contribution would be a toilet system that organically breaks down faeces into trapped bio-gas that could be burned to provide cooking fuel and electricity, and convert urine into fertiliser.

"Now we want others to know about this technology which was recently installed at Kabul, Afghanistan, because it can help meet the Millennium Development Goals and reduce global warming.''

Founded in 2001 as a non-profit organisation, the World Toilet Organisation aims to make sanitation a key global issue and now says it has 55 member groups from 42 countries.

yes, they are fine. Quite odourless.

A few problems with flushing loos. They use LOTS of water.
Poo is only a problem when mixed with water.
Poo is fertiliser. it is meant to go beack onto the land.
When it is flushed into the ocean, it is wasted. It is also not meant to be in the ocean.
So we are taking it from where it should be, and using lots of resources to put it where it should not be !!!

It would be intersting to calculate how much poo a city generates.   Well not exactly interesting.  More like educational.  Perhaps not even educational - more like revealing.

I mean what the hell would we do with all the dry poo if getting it wet makes it hazardous?  And just what is the quantity?  It would probably mean whole fields covered in poo to a depth of a metre.

Yummy veges would grow there.

I grew up in a fairly small town. One of my mates' father worked on the council and did maintenance at the sewer plant. My mate and I used to head up there occasionally and he would show me how you have to rake the condoms off one of the grills. Anyway, further downstream they had something resembling a concrete pig sty with an isle down the middle and rooms off to each side, with walls a few feet high. That is where the bulk of the solid waste ended up after the first phase of treatment, and there were pumpkin vines growing all over it. There wasn't very much of it. It didn't smell at all.

There are plenty of places where you could use it without without putting people's health at risk, such as timber plantations. It has to be better than dumping it at sea, then eating all the fish that swarm around it which is what we do now. There are also a lot of nutrients and chemicals (including Notrogen, phosphorous and potassium) that we go to huge economic and environmental expense to capture from other sources. Eventually we will have to 'close the loop' and start returning it to where we got it from. This is especially true in Australia, which has the poorest soils of any any inhabited continent.

There is something ...... right about doing a poo in the woods.

That's the greenie part of me coming out

Doing a poo in the forest makes one feel almost virtuous !!!