Crap Happens - Humanure Handbook

People really don't like to talk about it, but when you are living off-grid or out in the wilderness, disposal of human waste is a must. This book is very well put together.....this guy really knows his *Snip*! (Sorry, could not resist, lol)

The Humanure Handbook

Humanure

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[edit on 8/23/2009 by semperfortis]

Sorry about that SF....thanks for correcting it!

[edit on 23-8-2009 by desertdreamer]

cool a book all about poo!!!!!! I'm downloading it now. Composting is a great idea; in the 90's several farms started producing methane electrical plants, but the Feds shut them down.

S&F

Another one, about disposing of human waste in low impact, survival/camping situations is called How To "Poo" In The Woods.

reply to post by sanchoearlyjones


Here is a story about Cow Power in Vermont (story from Oct 2007). The methane is collected from the cows manure (at that time it was around 700 cows that they collected the manure from), and stored until processing. At the time of the article, there were over 4,400 people that were buying electricity that was made from Cow Manure.

Source

And here is a link to the California Poo Project....they are doing the same thing on their dairy farms.

Seems like a smart idea!

reply to post by The_Smokeing_Gun


Excellent find!

Wonderful contribution! I S & F'd you right after you posted but didn't have a chance to post a reply.

I had been wanting to find this book and hadn't really had an opportunity to. Thank you for doing that for me!!!! I've read most of it and WOW how simple it is to compost your own poo! I'd read other posts (such as on Mother Earth News) from people who had read the book and started composing themselves and was very impressed with how thrilled they all were.

Considering all the 5 gallon paint pails I have at the house from Home Depot .... Now all I need is straw, sawdust and a toilet seat! Oh, and a compost pile!

This is an idea whose time has come.
Building codes should be changed to require composting toilets.

It is funny but I purchased stock recently in a company that makes fuel from sewage including human and animal waste but it is not methane. They call it MagneGas and it is a natural gas (methane) substitute. This is a rather high tech solution but it just uses an electric arc under water and without oxygen to atomize waste and it sterilizes it at the same time. The residual material is a sterile fertilizer mostly and this MagneGas fuel.

The stock has tripled in the last few weeks. I am very happy with the idea that I am making money from poo. Poo into gold so to speak. It produces more fuel than just a methane breakdown of the waste and is faster and more compact.

They are going to make a home unit that can fuel your car over night using your waste. You got to love that idea. It does use electric power but it makes a lot of fuel for the money. It produces fuel at the cost equivalent of $1.20 per gallon gasoline. It also has more oxygen left after combustion than methane and less NOX and CO2. It is nearly a perfect fuel and the fact that it is made from waste is just a win win in my opinion.

edited spelling error:

[edit on 26-8-2009 by wayouttheredude]

Thanks for this info, i've yet to look through it but can see it being invaluable.

A cousin of mine who spent a lot of time in Costa Rica, said that some friends of his had a garden where in one corner of it the veg and plants did amazingly well. Turns out that the seage pipe came out around that area.

Food for thought. (Maybe best not to think of food and poo in the same sentence).

CX.

reply to post by cnichols


No problem, thanks for the S+F!

Wayout there, That is interesting.
Do you have any idea when the home units will be commercially available.

Being a farmer at heart, my biggest interest is in the fertilizer.
How long does the process take?
Composting can take years.

Originally posted by OhZone
Wayout there, That is interesting.
Do you have any idea when the home units will be commercially available.

Being a farmer at heart, my biggest interest is in the fertilizer.
How long does the process take?
Composting can take years.

According to the book it takes 1 year to "create" the pile (minimum) and a year to "compost" the pile (minimum). For those who are "fecophoes" composting for two years should resolve any internal conflicts they may be having.

Originally posted by CX
Thanks for this info, i've yet to look through it but can see it being invaluable.

A cousin of mine who spent a lot of time in Costa Rica, said that some friends of his had a garden where in one corner of it the veg and plants did amazingly well. Turns out that the sewage pipe came out around that area.

Food for thought. (Maybe best not to think of food and poo in the same sentence).

CX.

reply to post by OhZone


Sorry to resurrect this old thread but I did not pay attention and missed your question. The process for MagneGas takes minutes to produce a quality liquid fertilizer and an efficient gaseous fuel from human or animal waste.

The home units I keep bugging them on but the company president wants to sell cutting gas and sell plants in Europe and Asia. They are not that interested in the home units. Perhaps if I organized a share holder meeting and put that on the agenda it would get bumped up in their priorities a bit.

Do you like blood flukes? How about schistosomaisis? It's quite popular, being the global number two disease behind malaria. And just composting the human poo won't kill it, since part of the blood fluke life cycle is human poop while the other is in snails....which enjoy compost.

how do you stop your humanure from becoming an incubator for trematodes?

How do you feel about hepatitis C? Or just garden variety e. coli infection, from working with people's crud.


Yeah, there are great reasons why people in the developed world don't use their own gong for fertilizer.

Talk about pooping too close to the nest....

Originally posted by dr_strangecraftDo you like blood flukes? How about schistosomaisis? It's quite popular, being the global number two disease behind malaria. And just composting the human poo won't kill it, since part of the blood fluke life cycle is human poop while the other is in snails....which enjoy compost.

how do you stop your humanure from becoming an incubator for trematodes?

How do you feel about hepatitis C? Or just garden variety e. coli infection, from working with people's crud.


Yeah, there are great reasons why people in the developed world don't use their own gong for fertilizer.

Talk about pooping too close to the nest....

Schistosomiasis is only a problem in the third world. It is mainly endemic in Africa and parts of Asia and can be prevented by making sure the host of the organism (specific species of snails not garden snails) are not present. It can be easily cured using drugs. Which is why its a problem in the third world - they can't afford them So that wouldn't be a problem for this system.

Hepatitis C is only transferred by blood to blood contact. Also it wouldn't survive outside the body long enough to be infectious to another person after composting.

reply to post by Cecilofs


I hear what you are saying. All of the pathogens can be controlled in a methodical application of composting discipline.

The problem I have is the "methodical" and "discipline" parts. I worked on ranches where we raised horses, and composted the excrement. But if you have a lot of practice with composting animal crap, you know that there is a great degree of variability in each pile. Weather conditions, stomach contents, etc, mean that each pile needs to be worked differently. And when you make a mistake with grazers, the problem is simply having some poo that needs to be composted all over again.

But with omnivores, it is far more complicated, and the poo is much more variable. I have experience with pigs. Pig poo is the most difficult livestock poo to deal with, because it has such a high concentration of nitrogen (horse hit is a distant second). Nitrogen will kill the composting organisms, and worse (as has been learnt in industrial pig operations) can leach into to the groundwater. My understanding is that human poop, even under the best conditions, is almost as bad as pig, and takes 2 YEARS of composting to fully transform. That means that it will be twice as expensive as fertilizer, as any livestock poop.

You can probably do it on a personal scale, with an individual who is a true believer. But the idea of even getting a whole village to compost their crap safely and completely, is not believeable to me.

Have you ever used a latrine with a group of other people for a week or more? I got back recently from a hunting trip with 5 others, and we had to move the latrine every third day. And we had a nice seat and everything. But your composting will be as weak as the weakest member of your team. Hep C may not seem like a real threat, but what about dysentery?

I have a second line of reservations, that I didn't even mention in the post above.

If human manure works so well, why do you suppose it is so rare in the west? If you have british ancestry, then you're ancestors were intimately familiar with capturing sheep crap for composting---they could be fined if they were caught trying to keep their sheep in their own fields for the winter, and thus stealing the landlord's fertilizer. Don't you think they ever toyed with using human poop? Why didn't it go anywhere?

And why was the flushing toilet seen as such a Godsend? Back before mass produced steel pipes, plumbing was made from lead, and made by hand. It was incredibly expensive to plumb the cities of the 19th century, but it was seen as a critical public work. Wouldn't it have been much easier to simply compost their crap?

If this is such a good idea (and it could well be), why don't you think it has caught on before now? I'm not saying the 5-gallon flush is the ideal solution to the "number 2 problem," but it has benefits, or we wouldn't be where we are now.