Fertilized & sustainable crops, sanitary & sustainable cities

What do you get when you take a Chinese, Japanese and Korean historic solution to sanitary city living and use it as a modern solution for fertilizing the crops that support cities? Humanure. The catch is that this is no joke.

Humanure is a word coined by Joseph Jenkins that refers to the idea that composting human waste for use as fertilizer may be the key to sustainable farming. What is more, using human waste as fertilizer may be the key to sustainable cities, from a sanitary and environmental standpoint.

Though the idea sounds radical, it is in fact nothing new under the sun. At the turn of the last century, the process was used in China, Japan and Korea. Entire (lucrative) markets were built up around so-called ”night soil”. It was one of the reasons that in the year 1900, Tokyo (then called Edo) was one of the largest cities in the world. Folks living there did not suffer from diseases such as cholera and typhoid because human excrement was not mixed in with other waste that ran through street canals. The city was therefore much more sanitary than most and folks lived healthier lives.

What is the punchline today? It is that these ideas could be used again to solve the problem of a growing world population that requires increasing amounts of food to feed. After all, why let factories continue to mine and pump out fertilizers—nearly 100 million tonnes of artificial nitrogen and 37 million tonnes of phosphates—when fertilizers can be more easily obtained on the home front, quite literally?

All joking aside, we live in dramatic times. Dramatic times call for thinking out of the box, at least, and radical new solutions at best. For those interested in taking a closer look at the at-first-glance radical concept of using waste for sustainable agriculture and sanitary cities, Sustainable C highly recommends that read this excellent article by Kris De Decker.