Urine and human manure, or as Joe Jenkins who wrote the Humanure Handbook calls it are excellent organic materials for compost and fertilizer and I personally been
using the material for decades in gardening and reforestation. I personally believe humanure, because we are at the top of the food chain and have much variety in our diets results in the best fertilizer/compost available. An internet study will tell you that yields in growing can be increased 400 to 1000 per cent by using
diluted urine on crops, especially those requiring high amounts of nitrogen. Also urine in the compost promotes the growth of beneficial bacteria because of the presence of nitrogen. There is a very interesting project in Ethiopia where a Swedish man and his Ethiopian wife are showing people how to collect human
urine and "waste" and compost and grow food. You can see this project on Youtube as well as some of the work that is being done with humanure by
Joe Jenkins, of the Humanure Handbook fame in places like Mongolia and Haiti just to mention a few. A lot of the stigma is just a relearning process. When
one billion people a day, (that's Coca Cola's quote) can not find satisfactory drinking water, it means some of the other 6 billion of us need to stop using
drinking water for toileting. I live on a large sailboat and yet am able to compost all of my food scraps, urine and fecal matter. I believe food is "on loan" to us from the soil and we need to return it to the soil. Imagine if you will 7 billion people taking their
nutrition from the soil and then not putting anything back into the soil. Is it any wonder that growing now requires all kinds of chemicals in order to get the soil to grow. Remember human waster is not waste, unless you waste it and nature and the soil does not know waste. Waste is a human thing and its simply the
unwise use or abuse of resources. Ashes mixed with other organic material also makes a good "flush" in the organic no water toilet that goes into the compost pile.
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