[HN Gopher] Separating urine from sewage could mitigate some env...
___________________________________________________________________
Separating urine from sewage could mitigate some environmental
problems
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 117 points
Date : 2022-02-09 12:52 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| goda90 wrote:
| Another idea is to put human waste into properly managed fish
| ponds that can then be harvested for more food:
| https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/03/urban-fish-ponds-low...
| danw1979 wrote:
| > According to Simha's estimates, humans produce enough urine to
| replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus
| fertilizers worldwide
|
| They have got to be taking the piss.
|
| So worth the downvotes.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| > They have got to be taking the piss.
|
| The origin of this phrase (I am certain you know and merely
| detailing for others) is literally in the once-financially-
| viable business of collecting urine (from public houses,
| outdoor toilets, and even private houses) because it was a
| valuable source of ammonia before the invention of the (from
| memory, Haber-Bosch?) process for its industrial production.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| It was notable that it was more than just "viable", but
| seriously protected (by nobility) because that ammonia was
| needed (and a limiting factor in) the production of gunpowder
| - hence it was a matter of security.
| danw1979 wrote:
| ... but seriously, this astonished me. Would love to see the
| rough calculation behind this. My biochemistry isn't nearly
| good enough to begin to replicate this estimate.
| voxadam wrote:
| Regardless of the biochem possibilities I wonder about the
| engineering realities required to collect, isolate, purify,
| and distribute the urea and other nitrogen rich compounds
| from the waste stream.
| PeterisP wrote:
| On a theoretical level, all these fertilizers get added just
| so the soil doesn't get depleted by what gets driven away to
| the field and eaten by city-dwelling humans, so it kind of
| makes sense that they get delivered to our bodies and then
| expelled.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _Separating urine from the rest of sewage could mitigate some
| difficult environmental problems, but there are big obstacles to
| radically re-engineering one of the most basic aspects of life._
|
| I briefly had a project called _Pee on a Tree_ that got mocked
| and got no traction. This is why Earth is doomed: The simple
| solutions are derided while people overcomplicate things that don
| 't have to be complicated.
|
| Hoomans: Y'all fools deserve your fate and I shall say so in my
| dissertation for my degree in Human Studies when I get back to
| Vulcan.
| happimess wrote:
| I remember when Obama was roundly mocked for suggesting that
| people improve gas mileage by checking their tire pressure
| before road trips. Too easy and effective to be worthwhile, I
| guess.
| [deleted]
| dasKrokodil wrote:
| https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/09/recycling-animal-and...
|
| A related article from Low-Tech Magazine, published in 2010.
| skyfaller wrote:
| Also see https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/03/urban-fish-
| ponds-l...
|
| The end of that article is kind of sad because it details the
| reasons these very effective low-tech sewage treatment methods
| are being phased out, and they are some of the same systemic
| problems that are preventing climate action worldwide: - low
| cost of fossil fuels (due to negative externalities) driving
| out sustainable alternatives - global speculation on real
| estate / urban sprawl - inadequate regulation of destructive
| activities
|
| Everything will have to change for our civilization to continue
| in the face of the climate crisis, we must rethink every system
| our lifestyle relies upon, sewers included.
| maw wrote:
| I wouldn't set my hopes too high because of this. It's just all
| too prone to pee hacking.
| throwawaydroid wrote:
| Why not keep the pee and poop mixed, and use it to harvest
| biomethane? Effluent can still be used as fertilizer after
| capturing the gas.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S097308261...
| kingsloi wrote:
| Vice did a good documentary on NYC's effort to do just this
|
| You Don't Know Shit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiNiBZiR_uA
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVGdmE4_h4c
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra47l7fihZU
| quiet_cool wrote:
| Interesting, it looks like most of the liquid gets separated
| out early on in the process and released downstream(with
| processing???). Seems like a good opportunity to collect the
| pee part.
| everforward wrote:
| From my understanding, it's better for making biomethane if you
| separate them. The methane comes from feces, and bacteria
| digest parts of urine into ammonia, which slows down the
| bacteria that convert feces into methane.
|
| > Using an inoculum acclimated to high ammonia concentrations
| was critical to successful biogas production at these high TAN
| concentrations.
|
| That's what this part is talking about. They intentionally
| introduced bacteria that were tolerant of high ammonia levels
| to work around all the ammonia the urine gives off. The wild-
| type bacteria aren't tolerant of those levels of ammonia, and
| do a poor job of digesting the feces when mixed.
| poppafuze wrote:
| Article skipped the pharmaceutical contamination problem.
| cube00 wrote:
| All that processing sounds expensive, how about the direct
| approach? https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-09/diabetic-hiker-
| lost-a...
| lisper wrote:
| Ew.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| This is a great article. I didn't know about the urine-trap
| toilet (discussed about half-way through). It's a very elegant
| idea that adds very little complexity to the conventional toilet.
| Dare I say a solution that finally isn't full of sh*t?
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Why stop there?
|
| Eliminate the entropic, commingling contamination problem by
| separately collecting 1, 2 and everything else for resource
| extraction.
| bitwize wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, flamebait
| comments, and ideological battle comments to Hacker News?
| You've been doing it repeatedly. We've asked you to stop many
| times over many years.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29212633 (Nov 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26418766 (March 2021)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25563542 (Dec 2020)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22050749 (Jan 2020)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356769 (July 2019)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20350618 (July 2019)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20054704 (May 2019)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797087 (Dec 2018)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18114166 (Oct 2018)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18034335 (Sept 2018)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17517586 (July 2018)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577510 (June 2017)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13970380 (March 2017)
|
| At some point, we're going to have to stop cutting you all this
| slack and ban you. I don't want to ban you, because you also
| post good comments. But the damage caused by your bad comments
| is not ok, and we need you to take care of this.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the
| intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
| cree wrote:
| xyst wrote:
| Seems like these systems assume only human urine will go into
| these storage systems. But in reality, people tend to flush more
| than just fecal matter, urine, and water down the drain.
|
| In order to clean the toilet bowl, people will use highly
| poisonous cleaning solutions. How will these cleaning solutions
| mixed with the stored urine affect its usage as a fertilizer?
| Even if it is eventually dehydrated, wouldn't some of the
| cleaning solution still be present?
|
| What happens if you send other types of fluid down the "urine
| only" toilet or system (ie, blood, vomit)?
|
| People will even flush drugs, dead pet fish, alcohol and other
| non-human waste products down the drain.
|
| In theory, it sounds like a great way to reduce our carbon
| footprint. But if they are designing the system on the assumption
| that people are smart and will only use it as intended then it
| might actually cause the opposite effect.
| everforward wrote:
| > In order to clean the toilet bowl, people will use highly
| poisonous cleaning solutions. How will these cleaning solutions
| mixed with the stored urine affect its usage as a fertilizer?
| Even if it is eventually dehydrated, wouldn't some of the
| cleaning solution still be present?
|
| An interesting implication of that is that bacteria will break
| down parts of the urine into ammonia, and a little bit for
| feces but not as much.
|
| If someone were to dump bleach into it, it might create
| chloramine gas. Emphasis on might there; I'm in no way
| qualified to evaluate that risk.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Lots of article with lots of figures and charts, but not one
| picture of a block of urine. They claim to have made them and
| used them for growing (barley?) but apparently never took a
| picture of one.
| feketegy wrote:
| Anything but to sanction illegal activities of corporations who
| are doing the real damage to the Earth.
| toraway1234 wrote:
| cute_boi wrote:
| This is me to be honest. There are so many things we can do,
| but it seems we are focusing on thing that may only have
| superficial benefits.
| pie42000 wrote:
| This is by design. Paper straws are meant to distract your
| limited focus from things that actually matter.
| Raidion wrote:
| Alternately, there are a lot of things we can improve, and
| doing something small that's easily accomplished gets
| something done now, increases visibility, and add momentum
| to do bigger things. I know some states are banning (or
| limiting) plastic bags now.
|
| Does that solve the big problems of container ships burning
| bunker fuel, oil wells leaking methane, and the huge
| amounts of plastic caused by drink companies? No, but it
| definitely makes them look worse, and adds pressure to help
| make bigger change.
| howLongHowLong wrote:
| Neither will you read the article, which is certainly not about
| water reclamation. (Other than the water saved by peeing into
| freshwater less.) Surely if it seems natural not to shit where
| we eat, it's reasonable to think about strategies not to piss
| where we drink - you seem eager enough to keep the two
| separate.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Dressed with visual splendor: your food will be synthetic; your
| home will be abstracted; your leaders bathetic, and your soul
| distracted. Material austerity is coming.
| Why_O_My wrote:
| Is this a known quote from someone? Or where you feeling
| poetic today?
| germinalphrase wrote:
| Just feeling poetic and lacking in optimism. On an
| intergenerational level, I half believe it's true.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| evilthrow wrote:
| 988747 wrote:
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| and where does the energy and fertilizer come from to do
| that? right, fossil fuels. Last I checked, there's a
| currently an existential threat linked to use of those that
| are the main driver for why all these initiatives are going
| on.
|
| I'm not happy about it either but its a choice between each
| individual's footprint going down or reducing the amount of
| individuals.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| What exactly is the existential threat? If population is
| at all time highs, if lifespans are at all time highs, if
| crop yields are at all time highs, if deaths from natural
| disasters are at all time lows, what is the existential
| threat?
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| well, lets see here.. its currently causing increased
| forest fires, rising sea levels, desertification,
| glaciers melting, destabilization of the sea currents,
| collapsing ecosystems.
|
| DO I need to spell it out for you or are you willfully
| living under a rock?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Sigh.
|
| Why does every discussion about overpopulation immediately
| devolve to food supply? I get that seems like the obvious
| thing to talk about, but the real world of supply chains
| and materials is far more complex than "food". It
| guaranteed that we can industrially produce far above our
| current population levels and we'll totally screw up the
| planet. How do I know?
|
| Because of global warming and mass extinctions.
|
| What overpopulation discussions miss and devolve to also is
| that it isn't important on the number of people, it is the
| RESOURCE RATE PER PERSON combined with POPULATION that
| produces the "are we sustainable".
|
| What doesn't scare me is China and India's population. It's
| China and India's rapid climb to US-level lifestyles and
| per capita resource consumption rates.
|
| Here's the most important thing we are not conserving/shows
| we are overextended:
|
| 1) natural habitat destruction
|
| 2) everything else (water, metals, food, clean air)
|
| I'm not just talking about the Amazon. The amount of space
| needed for HUMANS isn't important. The amount of space
| needed by NATURE very very very much is.
|
| We drain all the swamps. We clear all the forest. We farm
| all the plains. We trawl the oceans.
|
| This is the most stinging indictment of modern economics:
| what is the economic cost of destroying a natural habitat?
| It's not zero, in fact every single economic study will
| likely point out "well we could exploit this forest for
| human purposes and gain tax and GDP out of it".
|
| That single failure, a TOTAL inability to quantify the
| economic value of a natural habitat in terms of sustaining
| the ecosystems, food webs, species
| proliferation/redundancy, production of oxygen/removal of
| CO2 isn't just going to kill us as a species, that's just
| garden variety extinction. It might kill the entire
| ecosystem and everything but single celled organisms.
|
| Our developmental economics should STRONGLY prefer cities.
| A high rise apartment building should be far cheaper, so a
| 3000 sq ft apartment should be 1/3 the cost of a suburban
| 3000 sq ft house.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Meat ag is the problem. If everyone had piles of
| sausages, burgers. and steaks for every meal, food
| production would be incredibly difficult and expensive.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > We could quite easily triple our food production if only
| those limits were lifted.
|
| We don't actually even need to triple the production -
| depending on the country and crop, anything from 1/3rd to
| over 60% of production (!!!) is wasted [1].
|
| This insanity has got to stop, and a lot of that waste in
| Western countries is caused by consumers wanting a
| 24/7-available selection of all kind of products in their
| nearest supermarket. And everyone who proposes solutions to
| that like requiring pre-ordering fresh meat and produce one
| day in advance (to curb the amount of what has to be thrown
| away at the end of each day) quickly gets branded a
| "communist" or comparisons with empty shelves in the former
| GDR/USSR crop up.
|
| Additionally: It's one thing (and bad enough) if stores
| keep around a dozen brands of basic yogurt around as that
| stuff needs a time to expire and stores have got pretty
| good at keeping that loss minimal, but all that packaged
| fresh meat... :'(
|
| [1]: https://www.fao.org/platform-food-loss-waste/flw-
| data/en/
| the-dude wrote:
| We are producing food to burn it ( Bio ethanol )
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Something like 3/4 of US corn production goes to ethanol
| (mainly for gas, people don't drink _that_ much) and
| feed.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah but that's not counted in "waste" statistics.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't start flamewars on HN. It's not what this site is
| for, and it destroys what it is for.
|
| Edit: since your account is using HN primarily for ideological
| battle, I've banned it. We ban accounts that do that regardless
| of what they're battling for, because it's so destructive of
| the intended purpose of this site. Past explanations if anyone
| wants more:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > That's in part because urine is rich in nutrients that, instead
| of polluting water bodies, could go towards fertilizing crops or
| feed into industrial processes.
|
| Huh? We're already producing _way too much_ fertilizer from farm
| animals, which leads to the situation that countries like the
| Netherlands [1] and Germany [2] experience a _massive_ oversupply
| of dung that has to be shipped sometimes hundreds of kilometers
| because otherwise the fields near the dung sources get way too
| much nutrients or the dung runoff fucks up river ecosystems.
|
| How about using _what we actually have_ right now in abundance
| instead of building highly complex systems designed to capture
| tiny amounts of human urine?!
|
| [1]: https://www.noord360.eu/2021/02/10/guelletourismus-warum-
| deu...
|
| [2]: https://sz-
| magazin.sueddeutsche.de/deutschland/drecksgeschae...
| leethargo wrote:
| My understanding was not that we have too much manure, but that
| it's too concentrated. If it were more evenly distributed, it
| would not cause the same problems with downstream water etc.
| manueldp wrote:
| NPR Planet Money Episode[1] has interesting details around
| Phosphorous mines in Morocco,
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/581149776
| contravariant wrote:
| It's probably worth pointing out that the component that's
| overabundant in the Netherlands (nitrogen) is only part of what
| can be recovered from urine. In particular there's a chronic
| lack of phosphorus.
| the-dude wrote:
| It is not overabundant, just abundant. We do have an
| overabundance of Natura 2000 lots.
| pvaldes wrote:
| If what you are proposing is to dump it in the natural
| areas, this is not a valid idea.
|
| Not all ecosystems admit an excess of nitrogen. Many rare
| species of wildflowers would be quickly replaced by
| nettles, elder and other common species and vanish.
| jcranberry wrote:
| Finish reading the article.
|
| >According to Simha's estimates, humans produce enough urine to
| _replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus
| fertilizers worldwide; it also contains potassium and many
| micronutrients (see 'What's in urine'). On top of that, not
| flushing urine down the drain could save vast amounts of water
| and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer
| systems.
|
| >In a study[1] that modelled wastewater-management systems in
| three US states, she and her colleagues compared conventional
| wastewater systems with hypothetical ones that divert urine and
| use the recovered nutrients to _replace synthetic fertilizers*.
| They projected that communities with urine diversion could
| lower their overall greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 47%,
| energy consumption by up to 41%, freshwater use by about half,
| and nutrient pollution from the wastewater by up to 64%,
| depending on the technologies used.
|
| [1]
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&d...
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| Yeah this here's a good post by j cranberry.
|
| At the end of the day, humans and animals are both part of a
| cycle of nutrient use and recycling those nutrients from
| waste, be that human waste or animal waste, is a way to cut
| down on synthetic fertilizer use.
|
| Some bits from the USA [0] [1] [2] that y'all might find
| informative. Important part is that manure comes in different
| varieties and it's not all a 1:1 replacement for synthetics
| in the way farmers use them today.
|
| Also of note is that, just like in Germany, parts of the USA
| that concentrate livestock have too much bull shit and that's
| bad for runoff from the livestock operations. But that's the
| expected result, ain't it? Concentrating feed from fields all
| over means you're concentrating what comes out of the animal
| also, which means you need to truck it off somewhere or end
| up with a local pollution problem.
|
| One other upside of pursuing human waste streams is that we
| already have a lot of infrastructure in place to process
| human sewage. Have a look at [3] right here and you'll see
| the potential-- but that's still less than half the
| phosphorous that Europe uses in the present day. Good news is
| that cutting back on fertilizer input doesn't result in a 1:1
| linear reduction in cereal yields so a reduction in
| fertilizer availability (after the phosphates get mined out)
| doesn't necessarily lead to a bad famine.
|
| These are complex systems here and there's no one-size-to-
| fit-them-all type solution.
|
| [0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/42731/16741
| _ap...
|
| [1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/42731/16744
| _ap...
|
| [2] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-07/docume
| nts...
|
| [3] https://www.nweurope.eu/projects/project-search/phos4you-
| pho...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > to replace synthetic fertilizers
|
| That _synthetic_ is the key. Replacing it makes sense - but
| why replace current wastewater systems at an enormous price
| tag with "tech magic" when we could simply use _existing_
| supplies of animal dung?
|
| > and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded
| sewer systems.
|
| ETA: Actually, sewer systems are more strained by _not
| enough_ wastewater flowing through them - they were designed
| to the load of many decades ago, prior to the invention of
| water-saving toilets, showers and other appliances. Now,
| there is not enough water let in, and the sewage doesn 't get
| swept away - the result is smelly [1].
|
| [1]: https://taz.de/Wasserverbrauch-in-Deutschland/!5032936/
| scythe wrote:
| I don't see how that addresses the GP's key point about the
| cost of replacing wastewater systems in literally every
| household. If I imagine, say, replacing all the walls in
| every house with modern insulated walls, windows with double-
| pane glass, roofs with solar panels, etc, a variety of
| environmental and economic objectives can be achieved. With
| regard to the very shiny "up to 47%" reduction in GHGE, this
| appears to be relative to the wastewater system, not the
| economy as a whole:
|
| >Urine diversion consistently provides improved environmental
| performance _relative to the conventional system_ for each
| scenario for all impact categories, except AP, as shown in
| Figure 2 (see Table S17 for data plotted in this figure).
| Both diversion alternatives reduced the GWP, CED, freshwater
| use, and EP categories from anywhere between 24 and 63%.
|
| As a reality check, there are still tens of thousands of
| homes in the United States using _lead pipes for drinking
| water_. The current regulatory and economic climate has made
| it infeasible to replace infrastructure that literally
| poisons people. Any reform that proposes to alter the
| physical structure of the vast majority of existing
| residential buildings must necessarily be situated in the
| context of laws, costs and politics that define what is
| possible for those buildings, and compared in terms of
| realistic costs and impact to the scores of other proposals
| to do similar things.
|
| This is a painful and depressing reality that anyone who has
| studied American urban development for more than a few months
| comes to understand.
| causi wrote:
| Are they seriously arguing that fifty percent of a
| household's water usage goes into flushing urine? That sounds
| like bullshit.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| According to [1], toilet usage accounts for ~24% of
| household water usage. The missing 26% to "about half"
| likely comes from removing the water usage caused by the
| production of synthetic fertilizer.
|
| [1]: https://www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water
| causi wrote:
| I'm having difficulty finding concrete numbers but I'm
| doubtful 26% of the world's freshwater use is making
| synthetic fertilizer.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| We could also stop producing so much dung...
| dumbfounder wrote:
| You jest, but I have thought about this. If we all take fiber
| pills and probiotics will that reduce waste, and also toilet
| paper consumption? Should we be introducing these things into
| the water supply like fluoride? (the answer is no, but would
| be an interesting exercise to see what impact it could have)
| openknot wrote:
| >If we all take fiber pills and probiotics will that reduce
| waste, and also toilet paper consumption?
|
| The problems I see are unintended consequences [0] of the
| policy. Perverse results could include additional
| environmental costs to producing and delivering fiber pills
| and probiotics (there would still be costs if added to the
| water). Unexpected drawbacks could include side effects
| from the fiber and probiotics delivered in this way
| (especially for people with unusual gut microbiomes, or
| defects in the production of fiber and probiotic
| supplements), and civil unrest from people who oppose the
| mandatory additions to the tap water (which may ultimately
| result in changes in the nation's political power).
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences
| tazjin wrote:
| > Should we be introducing these things into the water
| supply like fluoride?
|
| Absolutely not. Not all types of diets need fiber for your
| digestive system to function properly.
| dpark wrote:
| > _If we all take fiber pills and probiotics will that
| reduce waste_
|
| Fiber pills do not reduce waste. They increase it. That is
| the _point_ of fiber. It increases stool. Fiber is also
| known as "bulk".
|
| > _Should we be introducing these things into the water
| supply like fluoride?_
|
| This is like asking if we should put protein into the water
| supply. You can't just dump a bunch of psyllium husk into
| the water supply. It won't make it through the water supply
| and come out of the tap on customers' homes. It will just
| gunk up the city pipes, pumps, etc.
|
| If it did somehow work it would make the water supply
| disgusting to drink and unusable for many domestic
| purposes.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Most people in the US -- 66% over eat. Eat less, poop less.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| It's not just a US problem. Obesity is going up
| everywhere. Even in pets.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Let's stop putting sugar in water; that should solve most
| of the problem.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The "sugar in water" is not a problem, rather a symptom:
| it is a very effective and cheap way to get calories into
| a human.
|
| Way too many people lack a combination of access to fresh
| groceries (they live in "food deserts" [1]), enough money
| to afford these groceries [2], enough time to cook
| healthy food [3], or skills to cook food [4] - and most
| often these issues collide in poor and otherwise
| disadvantaged people... which again are at the highest
| risk of malnutrition, obesity and associated other health
| problems.
|
| The thing to tackle is _poverty_ because it sits at the
| root of all of these issues, not making sugary drinks
| more expensive - all this does is punish the poor people
| yet again for being poor!
|
| [1]: https://www.aecf.org/blog/exploring-americas-food-
| deserts
|
| [2]:
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/hunger/
|
| [3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-
| multiple-jobs...
|
| [4]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cooking-
| survey_n_955600
| p1mrx wrote:
| I don't think we should ban cheap sugar, just keep it in
| solid form. The human brain never evolved in an
| environment where thirst leads to calories.
|
| If you split soda into water and candy, then at least
| candy intake is visible and controllable.
| dpark wrote:
| You're conflating a bunch of separate concerns. You're
| saying that people are drinking soda because they need
| cheap calories and can't get them because they live in
| food deserts and are in poverty and somehow are obese
| despite insufficient calories. This all does not make
| sense.
|
| Soda is not cheap. A 2-liter bottle of Coca Cola contains
| 900 calories of corn syrup and costs $2 at my nearest
| Walmart. For the same $2, you can buy a 4lb bag of sugar
| and get 3400 calories if you don't care that your
| calories are coming from sugar.
|
| If you want something that at least kind of looks like
| food you could get 1200 calories of Chips Ahoy cookies
| for that $2 and while that's not good for you, it's gotta
| be better for you than soda. $2 will also get you about
| 1200 calories of Wonder bread or Great Value granola. Or
| $2 will get you a whopping 1500 calories of Kraft Mac and
| Cheese. Soda is a shitty deal in terms of calories. Even
| milk costs less per calorie than Coca Cola. And don't
| tell me poor people are mostly buying off-brand cola
| because it's not rich people making Coca Cola billions.
| (And it doesn't change much because I was mostly
| comparing equivalent brands. You can get calories from
| Walmart-branded bread as cheaply as you can from Walmart-
| branded soda.)
|
| People buy soda because it's tasty, convenient, and
| widely advertised, not because it's cheap calories.
|
| Obese people are also not in need of _more_ calories so
| the idea that they are turning to soda because they need
| cheap calories doesn't make a bit of sense.
|
| > _The thing to tackle is poverty because it sits at the
| root of all of these issues, not making sugary drinks
| more expensive - all this does is punish the poor people
| yet again for being poor!_
|
| These are orthogonal. You can "tackle poverty" and _also_
| make soda expensive. This isn't punishing people for
| being poor. It's placing a tax on a very unhealthy habit
| to make it less appealing, exactly as we do for
| cigarettes.
|
| This argument might be compelling if people actually
| needed soda for the calories, but they don't.
|
| > _skills to cook food [4]_
|
| This is an odd choice of article. It says literally
| nothing about poverty or why poor people don't cook. It's
| just some random survey of adults who say they don't cook
| and only 23% of them said it was because they don't know
| how anyway. Of those, there is some unknown overlap with
| the 51% who say their spouse does all the cooking and
| undoubtedly some overlap with other groups such the group
| who live at home with their parents and the group who
| have enough money to always eat out.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Obesity is going up everywhere. Even in pets.
|
| That's because most pet food is unhealthy crap - the
| worst offender is food that has sugar added for
| optics/smell reasons or grains because they are cheaper
| than meat. Healthy food for pets _stinks_ and looks bad,
| so manufacturers add sugar that the humans keep on buying
| it.
|
| On top of that, most pets don't get nearly the amount of
| movement they need - their owners don't have the time to
| take their dog on the two to three hours (!) a day that
| energetic, former work dog breeds need, or they are being
| kept solitary... if there is one thing that adopting a
| pair of kittens has taught me it is that they contain
| absurd amounts of energy that they burn through playing,
| and solitary cats can't release it.
| polskibus wrote:
| Do you have a source in English?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > has to be shipped sometimes hundreds of kilometers
|
| That's not very far, we used to ship guano halfway around the
| world. We don't produce near enough manure to fertilize all of
| our fields. Certainly we should use the manure we do produce,
| but it certainly isn't close to enough.
| hetspookjee wrote:
| The complete insane thing from the Netherlands is is that
| almost 25% of the drilled up gas beneath Groningen, and is
| causing earthquakes on a regular basis, is actually used to
| create fertiliser from. As far as I understand that is done
| because the yield from synthetic fertiliser is higher than from
| animal dung so unless I'm missing something we're actually
| trying to get rid of a lot of the dung by exporting it as well.
| Though I'm not entirely sure what happens with all the excess
| dung. I believe most of the organic dung is not yielding enough
| to be economically feasible and thus gets exported.
| aaron695 wrote:
| jensgk wrote:
| Brewery creates 'Pisner' beer using 50,000 litres of urine
| collected at music festival (Denmark, 2017):
| https://www.nme.com/news/music/new-pisner-beer-urine-from-mu...
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| I guess Pisswasser was already taken from Grand Theft Auto.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| The traditional thing is you mix urine with wood ash. This
| returns all the nutrient salts to the soil, and nitrogen.
|
| My one concern is sodium accumulation. There are some thermal
| approaches based on solubility curves that sort of work. I'd also
| be interested in electrochemical and, ideally, biological
| approaches (can we use biological cell membranes and ion pumps
| instead of manufactured ones?).
|
| Weighing difficulty against impact, this seems under-researched.
| apwheele wrote:
| I wonder what the 40% who wouldn't eat food fertilized by urine
| think about the fact that urea is a common cow feed supplement.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| I wonder how many of them also wanted to be an astronaut when
| they were kids.
| mah4k4l wrote:
| It's all about the marketing. I can see it now. The title of that
| Nature's article should also be the name of the new Lady Gaga's
| world tour where everybody would be doing lots of nitrous oxide.
| Plus maybe drag racing as a sideshow so as to compensate the
| taste differences.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Might be interesting to take a look at the past as well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_soil
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Wouldn't this also mitigate the problem of residual
| pharmaceuticals in wastewater, at least for aquatic life? The
| article doesn't say.
| c0brac0bra wrote:
| Excellent book on the topic of "humanure":
| https://www.amazon.com/Humanure-Handbook-4th-Shit-Nutshell/d...
| emj wrote:
| The chapters are available as downloadable PDF:s here
| https://humanurehandbook.com/contents.html
| wonder_er wrote:
| agreed! might be oversharing, but I've started this whole end-
| to-end process, since buying my house in a city. Going
| surprisingly well, surprisingly enjoyable.
|
| No need to bring in outside fertilizer, not flushing hundreds
| of gallons of potable water per month into the sewer, and I get
| top-notch compost to use for growing veggies.
| ciconia wrote:
| Drying urine, transporting it, this is extremely energy
| intensive. There's a much simpler solution: composting toilets.
| Easy to setup, requires very little input (basically just some
| dry material like wood shavings (i.e. waste from wood processing
| that you can sometimes get for free) and you're done. The
| "humanure" mixed with the dry material goes in a compost bin,
| sits there for two years, then can be applied to the local garden
| without any problem. If you have a vegetable/fruit garden you're
| actually closing a loop - giving back to your garden a good chunk
| of what it gave your body.
| clairity wrote:
| what about contamination? urine is not always sterile upon
| elimination from the body, potentially bringing along
| bacterial, drug, and other contaminants.
| Panino wrote:
| The composting process destroys pathogens by several
| mechanisms. The first is heat: in the pile, thermophilic
| bacteria raise the temperature through their own biological
| heat, killing E. coli, Salmonella, etc. My current pile was
| 149F (65C) yesterday. In a compost pile, those temps will
| kill pathogens in less than an hour. As a general rule of
| thumb the following temps/times kill pathogens in compost
| piles: 140F/60C for 1 hour; 130F/54C for 1 day; 120F/49C for
| 1 week. To measure this, you get a compost thermometer from a
| garden store and keep it in the center of the pile at all
| times, year-round. (The thermometer also serves another
| function: it indicates the degree to which your pile is
| biologically active, providing hints about moisture, carbon,
| and nitrogen levels.) So heat is the first mechanism for
| killing pathogens. Another is competition: the pathogens are
| directly killed by other bacteria in the pile.
|
| Once my compost bin is fully built, I let it sit for at least
| 1 year.
|
| The only thing to be really concerned with is certain
| chemotherapy drugs. Some of them not only don't break down in
| a compost pile, but they can cause cancer in people who don't
| already have it.
|
| The composting process is pretty amazing. It's vastly more
| hygienic than sewage (lol).
| clairity wrote:
| i can certainly believe that composting is amazing at
| dealing with all sorts of contaminants, but as @hedgehog
| sorta points to, i'd be worried that the sheer variety of
| contaminants you could get at a larger population level
| would present some significant unknown/unforeseeable risks.
| on a smaller scale, like a single family/household, i'd
| expect those risks would be more ascertainable and
| mitigatable.
| hedgehog wrote:
| I would also worry a bit about accumulation of drugs like
| lithium and other contaminants like PFCs. My suspicion is
| long term closed loop use of toilet compost for food crops
| could result in unsafe levels of contamination, have you
| done any research that direction?
| Panino wrote:
| I don't know about lithium in compost, but in general,
| composting breaks down many pharmaceuticals (again, apart
| from certain chemo drugs). Composting _does_ destroy some
| anti-cancer drugs like Salinomycin.
|
| PFCs may accumulate almost regardless, although I assume
| composting helps. After all, composting can break down
| gasoline, diesel, and TNT - though of course you
| shouldn't add them to a compost bin! Quoting The Humanure
| Handbook (4th edition) page 115: "About half the sewage
| sludge (biosolids) produced in the USA is applied to
| land, providing a significant opportunity for
| contaminants to enter soil systems and to bioaccumulate
| over time..." And page 117: "For example, brominated fire
| retardants were still found at almost eight thousand
| times higher concentrations than background
| concentrations in soil samples twenty years after the
| last application of biosolids. In another study, fifteen
| out of nineteen pharmaceutical drugs were still present
| in soil six months after being irrigated with
| contaminated wastewater."
|
| So PFC accumulation is _already happening_ but not
| because of composting. It 's happening because sewage
| sludge is being added to farm fields and new housing
| developments.
|
| This is part of why I cook with clay (in solar cooking)
| and stainless steel on the stovetop. That way my nutrient
| loop (eat, excrete, compost, grow more food) has the
| absolute minimum of PFCs and other contaminants.
|
| For more information, read chapter 10 of The Humanure
| Handbook (4th edition) by Joseph Jenkins.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Lithium I picked as it's a heavy metal that wouldn't
| break down per se, though maybe the form it would exist
| in post-compost would be plenty benign. The sewage sludge
| issue I'm unfortunately aware of and have been following
| due to this case:
|
| https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-
| outdoors/2022-02...
|
| In my area the majority of contamination is from
| firefighting foams, and I think in the Bay area there's
| also a lot in groundwater from semiconductor
| manufacturing. My understanding is the known way to
| remove PFCs from soil involves baking at very high
| temperatures (like 500C) which is impractical at any
| scale.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Lithium is not a heavy metal.
| notahacker wrote:
| They waterless separating toilets discussed by the article
| literally _are_ composting toilets. The difference is they 're
| proposing using the diverted urine to replace more energy-
| intensive commercial fertiliser production, rather than
| treating it as the less useful waste byproduct for people's
| gardens.
|
| (That and they're acknowledging that people who haven't chosen
| composting toilets tend not to like them, because the
| separating takes some getting used to and if you don't separate
| urine from faeces the decomposition is much slower and
| smellier)
| kingsloi wrote:
| My wife and I rented a Yurt in Fort Collins, CO, near the foot
| hills of Wyoming. The owner was super eco-conscious/zero-waste.
| I've not camped for a while, and haven't used anything other
| than a toilet for years, but something about doing my business
| in the out house really made the experience 10x better. I think
| maybe because I feel guilt whenever I flush a toilet that says
| "3.5-5 gal/flush"... that's a lot of water. I'm not sure the
| owner used the "humanure", but regardless, it was one less
| flush.
| ldiracdelta wrote:
| One of the weird things about compost toilet is that septic
| systems exist. If you're on a well in Colorado, you pump up
| the water, do your business, filter the water through
| hundreds of feet of earth and then pump up the water again.
| sgc wrote:
| Probably not, the water will usually migrate quite a bit
| before hitting well depth, depending on underlying geology.
| Composting toilets are also useful in the mountains where
| septic systems need to be extremely deep or will freeze
| during the winter.
|
| I do see the space for a septic system designed for
| rotation - ie that uses a pipe material designed to last X
| number of years that then itself biodegrades, and can be
| ploughed and the field used once a sufficient safety fallow
| period has passed.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post flamebait. It's not what this site is for,
| and it destroys what it is for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| somethoughts wrote:
| Kinda of reminds me of this fun video about a net zero desert
| house(/commune?).
|
| They proposed/demostrated a cycle that is basically
|
| Shower -> indoor plants -> toilet -> outdoor plants
|
| New Earthships capture more energy, water & food at lower cost
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVp5koAOu9M&t=1m45s
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Composting toilets usually divert the urine and drain it
| separately (gray water? Garden?) because it makes the rest too
| wet for good aeration and decomposition.
| cassepipe wrote:
| _The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of
| production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation
| of waste_
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Jokes aside, last year an algae bloom in Tampa bay killed _mega-
| tons_ of sea life, dolphins, sea turtles, Goliath groupers, and
| all.
|
| And the neurotoxin that does the damage _also harms people!_
|
| For a little perspective, Tampa bay still hasn't recovered from
| the last red tide event in 2017 which is evident by the specific
| fishing regulations implemented for the area.
| jimkri wrote:
| I found a study recently that points to the Mississippi river
| as one of the main contributors to the red tide. The extra
| nutrients that are coming down the river and going into the
| gulf is the problem.
| mooreds wrote:
| If you are interested in this topic, you should also check out
| this short book: https://www.amazon.com/Liquid-Gold-Logic-Using-
| Plants/dp/096...
| zabzonk wrote:
| This has been going on for quite a while:
| https://knowledgenuts.com/2015/05/04/doctors-once-recycled-p...
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