Shit News

News Related to Innovations in Shit

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EU countries prepare for textile recycling big bang

Recycling textiles is no easy feat, with industrial processes still in their early years. Yet, recyclers say a looming obligation for EU cou

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16 Billion for mining rare earth elements from mining waste streams in West Virginia and North Dakote

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Trash Magic Podcast

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Brown gold: the great American manure rush begins

The energy industry is turning waste from dairy farms into renewable natural gas – but will it actually reduce emissions?

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A Danish wind turbine giant just discovered how to recycle all blades

Danish wind turbine maker Vestas says it’s figured out how to recycle all wind turbine blades – even ones already sitting in landfills.

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A Toxic Stew on Cape Cod: Human Waste and Warming Water

Climate change is contributing to electric-green algae blooms. Massachusetts wants a cleanup of the antiquated septic systems feeding the me

relevant local agency link: the MASSTC

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U.S. FDA gives first-ever approval to fecal transplant therapy

The U.S. health regulator on Wednesday approved Switzerland-based Ferring Pharmaceuticals' fecal transplant-based therapy to reduce the recu

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Wastewater Disease Tracking: A Photographic Journey From the Sewer to the Lab

Here’s how a scrappy team of scientists, public health experts and plumbers is embracing wastewater surveillance as the future of disease tracking.

Gift Link/No Paywall

I was surprised to learn that this is happening at the hospital level, I assumed it was happing at the wastewater treatment plant for the whole city. 

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The poop-testing startup founder who lied to get on a "30-under-30" list is now officially a fugitive

You know someone is probably in deep sh*t if they flee the country. Jessica Richman and Zachary Apte, the married co-founders of fecal te

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Meet the Peecyclers. Their Idea to Help Farmers Is No. 1.

A shortage of chemical fertilizer, worsened by the war in Ukraine, has growers desperate. It just so happens that human urine has the very n

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This fuel is cheap, sustainable and completely safe - and we make over a million tonnes of it every day

Sanivation collects human waste from special toilets and turns it into sustainable fuel, which improves sanitation and reduces the environmental impact of burning wood.

“For every tonne of charcoal of our briquettes that we sell, we save about 88 trees here in Kenya. People are actually purchasing our fuel because of the environmental impact."

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Scientists at the Quadram Institute and the University of East Anglia have provided evidence, from research in mice, that transplanting faecal microbiota from young into old mice can reverse hallmarks of ageing in the gut, eyes, and brain. In the reverse experiment, microbes from aged mice induced inflammation in the brain of young recipients and depleted a key protein required for normal vision. These findings show that gut microbes play a role in the regulating some of the detrimental effects of ageing and open up the possibility of gut microbe-based therapies to combat decline in later life.

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The Other Dark Matter

Grossly ambitious and rooted in scientific scholarship, The Other Dark Matter shows how human excrement can be a life-saving, money-making resource—if we make better use of it. The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement a year. More than seven billion people live on this planet. Holy crap! Because of the diseases it spreads, we have learned to distance ourselves from our waste, but the long line of engineering marvels we’ve created to do so—from Roman sewage systems and medieval latrines to the immense, computerized treatment plants we use today—has also done considerable damage to the earth’s ecology. Now scientists tell us: we’ve been wasting our waste. When recycled correctly, this resource, cheap and widely available, can be converted into a sustainable energy source, act as an organic fertilizer, provide effective medicinal therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection, and much more. In clear and engaging prose that draws on her extensive research and interviews, Lina Zeldovich documents the massive redistribution of nutrients and sanitation inequities across the globe. She profiles the pioneers of poop upcycling, from startups in African villages to innovators in American cities that convert sewage into fertilizer, biogas, crude oil, and even life-saving medicine. She breaks taboos surrounding sewage disposal and shows how hygienic waste repurposing can help battle climate change, reduce acid rain, and eliminate toxic algal blooms. Ultimately, she implores us to use our innate organic power for the greater good. Don’t just sit there and let it go to waste.

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A short biography of human excrement and its value | Aeon Essays

Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it

An average adult produces about a pound (or half a kilo) of poo a day. That means that New York City, with its official census population of more than 8 million, pumps out more than 8 million lbs (or 4 million kg/4,000 tonnes) of excrement a day. Tokyo surpasses that slightly with 8.3 million lbs daily. China’s capital Beijing, a huge urban conglomerate of 21.3 million dwellers, beats NYC and Tokyo combined. Now imagine the mind-boggling piles of excrement that the planet’s 7 billion people generate in just 24 hours. Multiply it by 365 days a year, and it will likely make you gasp: Holy crap!