Once sewage is drained of water, treated, and dried – what the heck do you do with it?
Well, some of it ends up as fertiliser, but a massive 30 percent of our poop leftovers is sent to landfill to rot, or just sits in storage. What a waste.
Especially when, according to researchers from Australia’s RMIT University, using these ‘biosolids’ in bricks could be a surprisingly effective way of repurposing all that former sludge.
Making biosolids into bricks “is a practical and sustainable proposal for recycling all the leftover biosolids worldwide,” the team write in their new paper.
“Utilisation of only 15 percent of biosolids in brick production would reduce the carbon footprint of brick manufacturing whilst satisfying all the environmental and engineering requirements for bricks.”
BUILT LIKE A SHIT BRICK HOUSE??
For exterior use only, right? And just in low-income housing, you know…sh#tty neighborhoods.
Damn you Benito…beat me to it.
And if you use it to line a well, you’d have a shithole.
Now THAT’s a brick that I would be happy to buy and send to Madam Pelousy.
““is a practical and sustainable proposal for recycling all the leftover biosolids worldwide,””
Better than leaving it lying on the sidewalks.
I got hooked and binge watched the entire “historical farm” series put out by the BBC/UK. An able historian and two archeologists spent a full calendar year rebuilding and living on (in turn) a Tudor-, Victorian-, Edwardian-, and (WWII) War Time-era farms, using only the technologies available to those periods.
Turns out that in the earlier periods, before sewer systems, they would collect all the human waste in the large town/cities, like London, and transport it all to the farms to be used as fertilizer. Urine, especially (because it becomes ammonia) was used for a variety of things, from being a key element in dyes to various cleaning applications. Solid waste was mixed, for example, with the dung/straw/clay mixture in “daub” for wattle and daub walls. Those walls still stand today in many historic Tudor-era houses (you know, those quaint half-timbered Tudor houses?). Bricks are a very low-tech use of the stuff, actually.
If you enjoy learning about historical eras, I highly recommend the various series. They’re on YT.
I could have built a skyscraper by now.💩
I can’t for the life of me understand why the house smells like shit, after it rains.
Polishing bricks just doesn’t have the same ring to it…
Turning logs into bricks! That’s progress I guess.
Abigail, they use that fertilizing technique in China today. Why I avoid any China produced food products.
But can you pick em up by the clean end?
I would be worried, aside from the smell, that they would deteriorate in rain.
San Fran is ahead of the curve.
How about military use, such as shit bombs for crowd control vs tear gas? Add a little sulfur & skunk extract for taste, and you have the perfect non lethal riot control.
@Smudge — yeah, I know. I learned about China’s “night soil” reading about the country under Mao. The Chinese even had a song about carrying the night soil up the hills.
But in the BBC series they do mention an important aspect to using human waste on crops. They let it compost for a year. Apparently it loses any harmful toxicity after it sits for a awhile. And I think it was also said that they don’t grow any root vegetable in the stuff until after 1-2 years.
(Another interesting bit: early farmers stopped feeding their pigs table scraps containing meats and animal fats because the practice was linked to hoof and mouth disease.)