Why hasn’t every building and municipality switched to such smart tech? One barrier is money – sustainable technologies (especially new ones) require funding, and municipalities, which rely on taxpayer dollars, have limited budgets. Another challenge is the still-remaining taboo around the topic – many people just don’t love talking about sewage. And there are some environmental challenges too. For example, to be applied to land in the US, sludge must be what the US Environmental Protection Agency calls “Class A quality”. That means they must be free or contain only insignificant amounts of various pollutants, including heavy metals, pharmaceuticals or harmful “forever chemicals“. Wastewater plants that treat effluent from industry factories therefore may not produce sludge that’s clean enough. Yet, novel technologies may help solve these problems. Ultimately, the emerging technologies to recycle human waste can help us restore a more circular agriculture which our modern ways of life have lost. “I look at this as an opportunity to have the ultimate recycling system,” Wear says. “You eat the food, you excrete the food and then you capture the resources from that excretion – and use it to grow food again. “We don’t have the infinite resources on this planet, so we have to start recovering and reusing them.”

Lina Zeldovich (who was “sitting on a bio-toilet in Finca Gaia, an organic farm nestled in the midst of the tropical forest of Puerto Rico” at the beginning of the article?) Why it’s time to talk about poohttps://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220830-the-new-science-of-recycling-human-poo 30th August 2022