There's Gold in Your Poop

Why Flush Your Feces Down the Toilet when it Can Become Humanure?

No, I'm not referring to some specialty gold-speckled poop brought to you by the maker's of the Swiss alcoholic beverage Goldschlager. This is no special poop. I'm talking about your everyday, run-of-the-mill, ordinary poop. Common poop, if you will. Or feces. Seriously, there's gold in them thar feces. The popular term for what I'm referring to is humanure, combing the elements "human" and "manure." After all, that's what it is - manure of humans. And it's worth something.

In order to examine the value of humanure, one should look at the present common method of disposing of feces or poop. Typically, in industrialized nations, feces or poop is excreted into a toilet. Subsequently, said matter is flushed - utilizing upwards of two gallons of water - down the toilet. While the two gallon number is drastically reduced from the amount of water used to flush toilets in the past - reaching seven gallons just a few decades ago - there are low flow toilets that utilize closer to one and a half gallons of water when flushing the toilet.

After being flushed down a toilet, much poop - residing in populated areas - is transferred to sewer systems on the way to waste water treatment plants, at which time the water is cleaned. Of course, if the feces were never mixed in with the water in the first place, then the water would not need to be treated of the fecal contaminants. But, the fecal contaminants have to go somewhere, right?

Animal fecal matter, in addition to being used as a fertilizer or manure, has been used as fuel and in the creation of adobe structures. Furthermore, almost incredulously, it may seem, droppings of the Asian Palm Civet have been utilized in the creation of coffee. If animal manure has so many uses, you may be asking yourself why you're flushing your own manure down the toilet and that's a good question. Admittedly, human manure needs to undergo a treatment process of sorts before it can be properly utilized, but that treatment process is rather simple.