I’m currently watching “All About Dung” on The History Channel, which is a fascinating look at the history of human excrement.
Join host Monty Halls as he investigates the historical, medical, scientific and evolutionary importance of poop on an excremental safari guaranteed to fascinate even the most squeamish of viewers. You’ll be surprised by the amazing manner in which the world puts dung to use. Discover that through a 14,000-year-old human dung deposit it has been determined that humans inhabited North America 1300 years earlier than previously thought. Climb a 100-foot mountain of bat guano in Borneo that is teeming with insect life. Travel to India and view housewarming rituals using sacred cow dung as good luck. Finally Halls drinks coffee made from poop and investigates, through their large droppings, why mammoths might have disappeared.
I learned that Calcutta, India, has one of the world’s most advanced and “green” systems for dealing with its overwhelming supply of human shit, producing the base fodder from which an abundance of crops and fish are harvested. Dung is truly the heart of recycling, fully exemplified by enterprising Calcutta natives who, using cow poop, repurpose batteries to provide power yet again to the same battery. In Africa, elephant crap is being used to make paper. And here we are, in America, separating glass and newspaper once a week in logo adorned plastic bins. (To our credit, we do recycle our celebrities in cable reality shows).
Did you know if you could harness all of human excrement for energy purposes, you could satisfy 10-20% of the world energy needs? Did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?!? As a case in point, the host of the show took us underground to the London sewage system, where filtered sewage sludge was being fed into a turbine, where it is incinerated and turned into energy.
The engineer who oversaw London’s sewage-to-fuel efforts took the program’s host into the heart of the operation, and pulled out a cylindrical cross-section of the solid waste. Amongst the thick, dark, murky sludge, there was a single, solitary kernel of sweet corn.
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July 1st, 2008 at 3:53 pm
Wandering Chopsticks
Ha! When I lived in London, I watched a BBC documentary on the sewage system. During a plague? cholera? outbreak, the only people not affected were drunks. They found that the water pump was sucking up groundwater that had been contaminated by poop. So people were getting sick drinking shitty water. Drunks were only drinking beer and liquor, not “fresh” water so they didn’t get sick.
They also showed the end of the sewage treatment plant where huge sheets of sewage were compressed and burned as fuel. I was fascinated.
This is sad that I can respond to your crazy post with something of the same ilk. :P