Reimagined toilets at a South Korea university transform human waste into biogas
atlasobscura.comHoly shit... By the way, there's a weird-ass Korean adult animation about a dystopian world that has (tried to) solve their energy crisis by burning human feces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aachi_%26_Ssipak
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0972542/
Maybe those researchers have been inspired from that movie. Ah, how life imitates art...
The plot (highly NSFW by the way):
"Somewhere in the future, mankind has depleted all energy and fuel sources, however they have somehow engineered a way to use human excrement as fuel. To reward production, the government hands out extremely addictive, popsicle-like "Juicybars" to citizens, which in turn also makes them constipated. Aachi and Ssipak are street hoodlums who struggle to survive by trading black market Juicybars. Through a chain of events involving their porn-director acquaintance Jimmy the Freak, they meet a porn star named Beautiful, who gets a pink ring inside her butt which makes her defecations rewarded by exceptional quantities of Juicybars. For that reason, Beautiful is also wanted by the violent blue mutants known as the Diaper Gang (led by the Diaper King), the police (most notably the cyborg police officer Geko), and others."
Mad Max III also described a post apocalyptic world powered by methane made from pig shit.
So it seems like a commonish theme.
Although the comment was written as a half-joke, it's an incredibly obtuse and specific South Korean reference that others might not know, and I thought it would be fun to post about it.
Yep definitely. I appreciated it and didn’t know it previously. So cheers.
What a "shitty" topic to talk about, shall we?
I am happy to see a growing number of headlines about "rethinking" human waste management at any scale. Flushing toilets with potable water seems just very wrong, and a luxury I always thought western societies can afford only.*
The system that the article describes is a funny one, or at least is sold with humor ("get paid as you poop"). Apart from the technology itself, I think a good amount of being easygoing on the topic is important here: as how sex sells clothing, fart jokes sell novel feces-recycling systems!
Another example (no affiliation) is Kompotoi here in Switzerland:
https://www.kompotoi.ch/ (English available)
I was honored to do a particular type of business on these $5.000 toilets in the Swiss alps at 6.500ft, and admittedly felt like a king sitting on the throne of recycling!
Bottom line: drinkingwater-flushed toilets are not sustainable, nor accessible/affordable for the majority of the world, so let's stop being ignorant and seek for solutions.
Happy pooping!
* disclaimer: I grew up in Eastern European countryside, with no daily access to water flush toilets until I was around 8yo
I used a toilet once that was connected directly to the sink next to it. The sink had a faucet but no controls. When you flushed the toilet the water started coming out of the faucet in the sink so you could wash your hands, and then was routed from the sink's drain directly to refill the toilet's tank for the next flush. When the tank was full the sink shut off automatically.
It was genius! So simple and cheap yet effective. An interesting side effect is that after you flush the toilet the sink's faucet runs for quite a long time, which really makes you appreciate how much water is going in to each flush. Why don't all toilets work that way?
This sounds amazing. Was it just a proof of concept or an actual marketed product installed somewhere? Commercial or residential setting?
Something along this approach has been used in "modern" house hydraulics in the last few years here in Italy, though not common, as it is used only AFAIK in self standing houses (not apartments buildings).
In practice there is a reservoir where the "almost clean" waste water (i.e. what comes out of the bath sink, bidet and shower/bath tub) is accumulated.
Toilets are fed by a pump with water coming from this reservoir, in practice you use the same water two times.
It’s an actual product. My grandma in Australia has had one for 10 years.
I’m guessing it never took off because we don’t have that much of a water shortage in most places that washing hands is a luxury.
It was at a place called Cypress Valley outside of Austin, TX. https://www.cypressvalley.com
Note this was many years ago...
Pretty common in Japan, if I recall correctly.
Yep, used these myself multiple times.
They have used human feces in North Korea to fertilize their fields with the effect that people got worm parasites:
> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/16/body-of-north-korean-defecto...
Also, human feces can contain anti-biotics and other stuff that you shouldn’t be spreading over soil. There is a reason why hospital waste water gets special treatment before disposed of into the sewers.
I don’t think using human feces as fertilizers is a good idea.
It is, at least where I am coming from, well-known that raw human feces must not be used for fertilizing soil; However, composted (long enough / on high temperature) would break down the pathogens that are bad for humans.
See more on wikipedia about fertilization using human feces [1] and in general, applications of composting toilets [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_feces#Use_as_fertilizer
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composting_toilet#Applications
When my father was stationed (in the US Army) in South Korea in the early 1960s, human "nightsoil" was the primary fertilizer there as well. It's an obvious source of cheap fertilizer, even if it has some health drawbacks. Obviously the economic success of the South has allowed it to not do that anymore.
> Flushing toilets with potable water seems just very wrong, and a luxury I always thought western societies can afford only.
I assume the cost and potentially even environmental impact of reusing existing potable water infrastructure to provide water for toilet-flushing is much less than manufacturing, installing & maintaining separate local systems (to collect rainwater, etc) for this purpose.
Depends how much water costs; in the UK water is cheap compared to the cost of a plumber, but the UK is famously moist. I wouldn’t be surprised if plenty of more arid environments would find the cost going the other way, and preferring some combination of rainwater collection, greywater reuse, or non-water-based toilets.
You are absolutely right, however, as ben_w below also pointed out, while the economical / environmental impact might not be justifiable in our western bubble, it might be outside of it.
There are still places on this planet where clean drinking water is a scarcity, and therefore - along multiple other reasons - water-flush toilets and accompanying infrastructure cannot be (easily / justifiably) built.
However, as we can see there are different solutions to the problem itself (health-risk free, humanic way of taking a dump) without using up gallons of water.
My house has a non-potable water supply used for irrigation, and is in fact required by the town to. I know the same is true in some parts of Utah and probably other places. In such cases, also requiring toilets to be supplied by the non-pot line would be a trivial cost that would pay for itself eventually.
If you’ve already got it then it makes sense to use it, but this doesn’t remove the cost of building and maintaining separate infrastructure at all.
In some cases it might be worth it or necessary, in others I think the process of processing & delivering potable water could be made (or is already) so efficient that building & maintaining separate infrastructure for non-potable water would be a net negative both in terms of cost and environmental impact.
There are plenty of places around the world with western style toilets but flushed with rainwater or recycled washing machine/shower water instead. That seems like a fairly sustainable solution that already works?
Yes, those are better solutions, however still not really sustainable, and without incentives to build the accompanied infrastructure, it's never going to be sustainable; whereas solutions like the composting toilets are fairly easy to implement - FWIW ~ that's what we had before water flush toilets, isn't it?
Speaking of eastern europe, here is some anecdata. There are villages and towns in Romania that received EU funding for water and waste treatment. Naturally money have been embezzled and instead what they got was “drinking” water with traces of fecal matter (bacteria and the resulting chemicals). When confronted about it, the locals (not even those responsible for the issue), said that the water tastes real good and are “proud” of what their mayors did to the water system. They even said its healthier than city water because it’s “eco” and has less chemicals. No less than 892 communes benefit from the blessing of “real good” water (a commune usually covers a few villages, so you can imagine the scale of the issue). And yes, they voted the same people back in and are staunch defenders of their “performance”.
Source (in Romanian, published by an investigative reporter): https://recorder.ro/harta-apei-contaminate-din-satele-romani...
Hi there; although I can relate the (corruption-induced) negligent use of EU-money in Eastern Europe, as the guidelines [1] instruct, please avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents while commenting.
Methane from sewage was used in London gas lamps since the 1890s when the Webb Sewer gas lamp was invented. [https://nikmorton.webs.com/webbgaslamps.htm]
The most famous surviving example is next to The Savoy hotel on The Strand [https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/F...]
Don't mean to shit on it, butT central waste water treatment plants also do this. At least some. So I don't really get the novelty of it?
In Copenhagen, 30-50% of the gas in the consumer network is produced like this.
The novelty is that they want to use feces as a universal currency. This idea is very precious indeed, if you look close enough.
I’m convinced that the solution is a system that uses a long tubular plastic liner that continuously renews the surface of the bowl between uses and simultaneously traps the session products in a sealed bag via thermo sealing.
Why do it this way? Uses no water while not allowing the accumulation of smelly material. But why seal the product into bags?
The waste needs to be disinfected before it can be disposed of in a casual manner. And ideally the smell should be neutralized. I think the best way to do this is by heating it up. Incinerating your poop every time you poop is too energy intensive. Instead, you can save up the bags and then burn them in large batches. Or send them off to be processed elsewhere.
Sounds like the loowatt system: https://www.loowatt.com/toilets.html
I keep expecting to see squat toilets. Especially for public facilities. Nothing to break. Use power washer to clean. Doubles as a floor drain.
I'd use a squat toilet in my house if it had some kind of air lock. Maybe like the Tidy Diaper Pail. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Tidy-Diaper-Pail-Pearl/900658925 Pure frikkin genius.
Urine powered phones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LTprRQTKAw
MFCs (Microbial fuel cells) are waiting to feast on all manner of horrible stuff and produce energy. I'm not sure where economic incentives for peeing and pooing would go long term though.
What happens to the leftover content after the methane is extracted?
Can it be used as a manure or is it safe to be dumped underground or in rivers?
>Can it be used as a manure or is it safe to be dumped underground or in rivers?
Absolutely! A danger of human waste is that it carries a lot of pathogens that might be benign or beneficial in the lower intestine of one person but cause disease in the stomach of another, but the solution to that problem is to let it ferment/decompose for a bit and let all the bacteria kill themselves off through starvation and cooking in their own metabolic heat, and during that process is when you collect the methane. You'll often see large piles of cow manure composting in big piles for similar reasons, though the methane isn't always captured.
The danger to dumping any kind of waste into a river, treated or not, is that it will start killing anything that finds it toxic (most likely your fish and amphibians) and feed anything that finds it nutritious (algae, bacteria), which can cause ecological imbalances and generally screw up your ecosystem. For an adjacent example, look at the Gulf dead zone caused by fertilizer runoff from the American corn belt: Fertilizer feeds algae, which then chokes out other plants fish need to survive and absorb oxygen when the algae dies off, leaving a large swath of ocean without fish or anything that relies on fish.
Excellent manure, feedstock for compost. Still too toxic for dumping into rivers.
Deeply familiar with it :) and the Humanure Book goes on at length about how to compost the shit and make very sure it is safe to use. The solids that come out of a methane digester must be composted to render them safe.
I'm pretty there are all sort of health issues in using human sewage as compost. Look at North Korea for an example of that.
There are already ways of converting human waste into protein. 100kgs of human waste can be converted into 40kgs of protein.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/07/06/from-fec...
Yummie Brownies!
I would like to look. Do you have some links ?
As far as I understand they have a shortage of everything, including livestock, so they end up using human feces as compost. This becomes a disease vector and you end up with ground water and vegetables contaminated with all sorts of parasites. This is specially critical for children because intestinal worms effectively hijack what little nutrients they can eat, creating even more malnourishment. [0]
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-unicef-idUSKBN...
North Korea is also terrible example about having government at all.
IIRC the problem was that they were using improperly treated waste.
Meanwhile, there is a "War on Poop" in North Korea https://youtu.be/8yqa-SdJtT4?t=1898
I don't get the novelty. My uncle used to work in Sweden on a project similar to this in the 80s.
The headline is an euphemism of the year!