TreeHugger Tips: How-to Manage Humanure Composting
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA on 07. 1.08
Our Green Tips project just keeps on rolling forward., with plenty of useful, inspiring video tips being submitted. From Gary Vaynerchuk's thoughts on car pooling to Lee Welle's musings on how to inspire environmental stewardship in kids, our readers certainly aren't short of useful green advice.
Today we're getting dirty. Joseph Jenkins, author of The Humanure Handbook, delves into an important, if somewhat controversial subject – composting human faeces. In the video above, Joseph explains how to set up a safe, secure humanure composting system. Below he shows how to empty the bins. You can check out more of his videos on composting, gardening and travel via his own YouTube channel.
While some people may be put off by the idea of gardening with human waste, as long as it is done properly there really shouldn't be any safety concerns. And as Joseph explains in a few of his videos, when done properly humanure composting systems are almost odor-free. And there is no doubt it is an important subject. As the blurb for Joseph's book says: "There are almost seven billion defecating people on planet Earth, but few who have any clue about how to constructively handle the burgeoning mountain of human crap."
Check out the rest of our TreeHugger video tips.
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I work at a waste water treatment plant. One of the by products of our process is sludge, which is sent to a composting facility and mixed in with the mulch that we all buy for our flower beds. It's an amazing product and great for incorperation in gardens as well. I would not recomend the composting process for individuals. There are far too many diseases that can be cultured and transfered if the process is done incorrectly, or your kids get into it before the process is complete. Just visit your local water water treatment plant and inquire about sludge.
is the compost labeled as containing sludge?
People pour all sorts of chemicals down their drains that end up in that sludge. Read Biosolids Applied to Land from the National Research Council
Composting toilets go the extra mile. They don't combine the nutrients from human waste with chemicals or drinking water and they recycle the nutrients back into the earth safely without any sort of large scale infrastructure.
We manage our own faeces and it's no big deal. It's down to education, James, known as getting your shit together!
We set up our system having spent several weeks investigating and discussing it and have a simple, clean procedure for managing it.
Human waste is a fantastic resource which, in the light of world-wide resource depletion, should be talked about, encouraged and de-tabooed. The process is straightforward, satisfying and available to anyone who has room for a compost heap.