I am urban, and I am gonna stay that way, but I am interested in turning waste into "profit".
I am already making use of my pee, to good effect. I would love to compost my turds, but I have very limited space, a disapproving spouse,and a lazy attitude toward composting.So I was thinking I might combine my love of burning things with a need to use up and sanitize my turds.
My web-fu show that this is something "progressive cattlemen are considering, and that it will produce nutritious ash, but nothing else.
Any thoughts or experiences on this matter?
I am also interested in finding out what one gets when one distills urine, but I haven' looked into that yet...
William Bronson : How Urban are you , if you had private access to a roof you could daily turn your turds into Bio-gas ! Check out The running threads on Bio-gas
in the Energy Forums ! You pay it forward, It takes 3 weeks to work up to full gas generation and then your table scraps should daily provide about 1/2 of your
cooking gas !
When you allow urine to set around it naturally turns to Ammonia - which is a handy stain removal material, exactly how to free this out of pee, I leave to you !
Give us a report !
For the Future, For the Craft! be safe, keep warm! - As always, your questions and comments are solicited and Welcome ! PYRO-LOGICALLY Big AL !
Certainly with biochar, and likely with biogas also, you will lose most of the nitrogen content in the humanure......one of it's primary plant nutrients. A well managed compost shouldn't take up much more space, or produce odors more offensive, than your biochar barrel.....
William Bronson wrote:
I am also interested in finding out what one gets when one distills urine, but I haven' looked into that yet...
Mostly, you get water. Urea and salts get left behind. I suppose if you are on a real bender and have a high blood alcohol, you might get a teeny bit of ethanol in the distillate. There is phosphorus in the salts left behind, that's how the element was discovered. But not very much. Brand had to collect 1100 liters of urine to make 60 grams of phosphorus.
As far as fecal matter, you could team up with a poultry operation that is turning their used litter into biochar. Most of those manure--->biochar operations are of the continuous feed variety, so dumping a bucket in of a different variety shouldn't be a problem.
Alder Burns : Properly constructed, every day you get a Bio-reactor brewed 'Compost Tea' equal in volume to that pail of 'slops' that you poured into your bio-reactor !
Basically, you are using bacteria to digest your 'organics', producing Methane ( CH4 ), as a waste product! Think of the alcohol and CO@ released by Yeasts ! In both
cases you are talking about the little beasties waste products ! With regular composting we are accepting that we will have methane losses and some N2 loss, here we
have a central location where we are collecting and using up the methane before it can be lost to the atmosphere !
My philosophy is we can not do Everything ! We can all do one sustainable thing ( The low hanging Fruit ), then one more sustainable thing, and one more after that !
For the future good ! Be safe, keep warm ! As always, your questions and comments are solicited and are Welcome ! PYRO-MAGIC ! Big AL
Allen, I think your exclamation point key is stuck. I would also take more care with pathogens than you seem to.
I think a biochar retort is probably the quickest, surest way to kill any pathogens. I also think I would be wary of leachate from a biogas system where you periodically add fresh turds, as you have no way to know what pathogens have bypassed the processing entirely.
Also, as far as torching the nitrogen goes, our turds only contain about 30% of our nitrogen waste; the rest comes out in our urine. Divert urine and you have already saved most of it.
-CK
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