Do you have a toilet? In the world today, 2.6 billion people are without a toilet of any kind. That’s about half the global population. If you have a safe place to relieve yourself, consider yourself lucky.
Are you curious? Do you ever wonder where the waste your body produces every day ends up? Like most other aspects of your daily survival, they are part of a much bigger system.
If you’d rather read about this on paper, scroll down to our book list.
In the U.K., your waste takes with it over 30% of treated household water. 30% of the water supplied to your house—water fit to drink—gets flushed down the toilet and sent back to sewage treatment plants, where everyone’s human waste is repeatedly separated away from industrial effluents that also go down the sewer. Most of the sewage byproduct—a sludge of human waste that’s rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, and polluted by carcinogenic industrial heavy metals—ends up back on the land. Much of the sludge ends up in the ocean, where the phosphorus kills sea life.
In a Loowatt System, human waste treatment can happen locally, at any scale, without the need for water. Your daily output of waste produces energy—enough to power a reading lamp every evening.
In our current food system, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium—the three key ingredients in fertilizer—are mostly mined or produced industrially. But in theory, urban populations produce enough of all three from their waste to fertilize their own crops. In fact, this was how most urban waste treatment systems worked until the 19th century advent of mass waterborne sewage.
Many sewage treatment plants use anaerobic digesters—large-scale wet ones—in some stages of their water treatment. The resulting energy powers just a small portion of the massive energy drain required to clean all that water.
Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a biological process in which organic waste is consumed by micro-organisms in oxygen-free environments. The byproduct is biogas: methane (CH4, 65%), carbon dioxide (CO2, 33%) and other trace gases (2%). For comparison, the natural gas supplied to ordinary gas stoves and boilers is about 80% methane. When biogas is burned, the methane converts back to CO2 and water vapour, so the gas is clean burning and carbon neutral.
The other byproduct of AD is fertilizer. The process homogenizes the nutrients making them easier for plants to access. The output is a semi-liquid manure that is easily separated into liquid plant food and fiber-rich manure that’s perfect for digging in under newly planted crops.
In most of the world, not to mention your stomach, AD is happening already. Some believe that humans have used AD for gas production since the ancient city of Ur—a hypothesis that’s difficult to prove. Today, in parts of India and China, AD is widespread on a household scale, treating a combination of animal, human and food waste. In Germany and Austria, there are towns that run completely on biofuel sourced from farm digesters in the outskirts.
If you’d like to learn more about toilets, anaerobic digestion, and related topics, we highly recommend the books listed below. If you want to be part of a paradigm shift in sanitation, we highly recommend you get a Loowatt system.
The Human Generation Reading List, Abridged:
- The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste,
by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbot Miller (1996) - Running a Biogas Programme: A Handbook,
by David Fulford (1988) - Lifting the Lid: An Ecological Approach to Toilet Systems,
by Peter Harper and Louise Halestrap (1999) - The Toilet Papers; Recycling Waste and Conserving Water,
by Sim Van Der Ryn (1977) - The Bathroom,
by Alexander Kira (1976) - Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives,
by Carolyn Steel (2009) - The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste,
by Rose George (2008) - Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,
The Museum of Modern Art (1972)