Honey-sucker trucks deliver their load to farmers,

whose crops benefit big time(Image: Vishwanath

Srikantaiah)
2 more images
We shouldnt pooh-pooh the idea of fertilising
crops with our urine and faeces it's safer
than it sounds and the benefits would be
huge
See more in our photo gallery: "Sewage
solutions: Six alternative toilet technologies"
LOCALS call them honey-suckers, but don't
be fooled by the name. They cruise through
the high-tech streets of India's newest
megacity, sucking up its lowest-tech problem:
sewage. These trucks empty Bangalore's
million septic tanks and pit latrines, where the
majority of its 10 million inhabitants relieve
themselves.
In most places, sewage trucks discharge their
cargo into streams and lakes, adding to local
pollution. But in Bangalore, the honey-suckers head for farms outside the city, where their stinking
loads are in demand to fertilise vegetables and coconut and banana trees. The farmers pay good
money for human waste; it produces bumper crops. For them, it is sweet.
The honey-suckers of Bangalore are evidence that the world of excreta is being turned upside down.
Realisation is growing that our faeces and urine are not simply waste to be disposed of as fast as
possible, but a valuable resource. Flushing sewage into rivers is not just an environmental
catastrophe, it is also a ludicrous waste of nutrients that could be helping to feed the world.
Consider what you excrete. You produce some 500 litres of urine and 50 kilograms of faeces a year.
Besides the water and organic carbon, your annual output contains around 10 kilograms of nitrogen,
phosphorus and potassium compounds, the three main nutrients plants need to grow - helpfully in
roughly the correct proportions. This is sufficient to fertilise plants that would produce more than 200
kilograms of cereals, says Christine Werner of the German development agency GIZ.
Scale that up and the world's population excretes 70 million tonnes of nutrients annually. Applied to
fields, this could replace almost 40 per cent of the 176 million tonnes of nutrients in chemical
fertilisers used by the world's farmers in 2011.
Spreading human sewage on fields that grow crops doesn't sound appealing, but it is safer than you
might think. Urine is normally free from the pathogens that cause diseases, while soils help to filter
and clean bacteria found in faeces. Processed and handled correctly, the organic carbon and
nutrients in urine and faeces makes soils more fertile and better able to hold moisture. The benefits
would be huge. Recycling our waste onto fields would increase food output and make life a lot easier
for poor farmers, who often cannot afford fertiliser. For example, a typical family in Niger, one of the
world's poorest countries, annually excretes nutrients equivalent to 100 kilograms of chemical
fertiliser, worth a quarter of a typical rural income, according to a study by Linus Dagerskog of the
Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden.
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Flushed with success: Human manure's fertile future
21 February 2013 by Fred Pearce
Magazine issue 2904. Subscribe and save
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Replacing chemical fertilisers would also conserve supplies of phosphate minerals, which are
running low. And while nitrogen in the atmosphere may be practically inexhaustible, converting it into
fertiliser is a major user of the world's energy. Just as the world has to find ways to reuse scarce
metals, so we need to find ways to recycle nutrients.
Thanks to public health campaigns, most people in urban areas - an estimated 2 billion people -
have access to private or communal toilets. Unless they are connected to a sewer, these toilets
empty either into pit latrines, usually little more than a hole in the ground that allows liquids to seep
away while solids accumulate, or into septic tanks, where bacteria and an anaerobic environment
encourage the solid waste to decompose.
These repositories need periodic emptying or they overflow into the streets. Few municipal
authorities step up to the task, so private enterprise has stepped in to fill the gap. Latrine and
septic-tank emptying is a vast industry, little discussed and little regulated.
In India, despite laws banning the practice, an estimated 1 million people from lower castes, mostly
women and girls, are still paid to scrape the shit from the nation's 100 million or more tanks and
latrines, usually with nothing more than a shovel and bucket. They dump the contents in nearby
drains or on waste ground. Such places are notorious. In the Ghanian capital Accra, most of the
contents of the city's septic tanks end up on the city's mockingly named Lavender Hill.
The fast-growing cities of the developing world are trying to deal with their waste in the way most
industrialised countries do, by connecting every building to sewer networks. These take sewage to
distant treatment plants that remove solids and other dangerous contaminants before discharging
the effluent into rivers. But the infrastructure needed is vast and expensive, says Stanley Grant of
the University of California at Irvine, and the treatment is energy-intensive. It also leaves behind
solids, which contain most of the valuable nutrients, that end up as landfill.
Sewer networks also rely on huge amounts of water to flush toilets - water that in many places could
be better used for drinking or irrigation. Dealing with the contents of flushing toilets typically requires
more than a third of a city's water supplies, with growing cities taking water from farmers who need it
to irrigate crops and feed growing populations.
Pull down your pants
As a result, few of the world's megacities - and even fewer of the thousands of medium-sized urban
areas - have fully functioning sewer networks. And of those, only around a tenth deliver their
contents to functioning sewage treatment works. Most discharge raw waste into rivers, where it turns
thousands of kilometres of waterways into lifeless open sewers. Further downstream, raw sewage
helps create dead zones that now cover 250,000 square kilometres of ocean. "We need to take the
waste out of waste water," says Grant.
He and others are urging governments to take a fresh look at what we are trying to achieve with our
sanitation systems (see diagram). They should be based not on flushing our problem away but on
"closing the loop" in our nutrient cycle, says Pay Drechsel of the International Water Management
Institute (IWMI) in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Drechsel thinks it's a good thing that farmers in some parts of the world are recycling sewage onto
their fields - though they are doing it unofficially, usually clandestinely and often outside the law.
They are reviving an old tradition. Before the invention a century ago of the chemical process for
converting nitrogen from the air into the nitrates plants can use, sewage was widely spread onto
urban "sewage farms". Traditionally, it was collected in the dead of night to avoid offending people's
sensibilities - hence the term night soil - and used to grow vegetables and other crops.
Campaigns to improve public health and the introduction of flush toilets meant that the practice grew
obsolete in most places. Even so, where sewer systems developed, farmers still sometimes
competed for the network's outpourings. In a few places, this has persisted. Since the 1890s, most
of the sewage from Mexico City has been piped untreated to the fields of Tula valley to the north.
Today, the megacity's 21 million people continue to fertilise more than 100,000 hectares with their
faeces. The remains of the city's digested beans, tortillas and chilli peppers double yields of corn
and almost triple the rentable value of farms, says Blanca Jimenez of the Mexican Academy of
Sciences. Shit has made Tula valley farmers wealthy.
The practice is going through a purple patch in many urban areas in the developing world (see
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diagram) - especially in dry regions where farmers value the guaranteed year-round irrigation as
much as the nutrient supply. In Pakistan, sewage grows a quarter of the country's vegetables. In the
Indian state of Gujarat, farmers compete for the sewage at annual auctions, preferring it to
freshwater irrigation.
Now, the honey-sucker trucks are offering farmers another option - the sewage from millions of
septic tanks and pit latrines. Increasingly, the drivers of these trucks have found that they do not
have to run the gauntlet of public opprobrium by dumping their loads onto wasteland or into drainage
canals. Farmers within and around cities will gladly take their "honey".
"Sometimes the drivers charge the farmers, and sometimes they pay them. It depends on the
season and the market," says Vishwanath Srikantaiah of Biome Systems, a Bangalore-based
consultancy that has investigated the practice in the city. Typically, farmers put the sewage into
drying pits to kill pathogens and to concentrate the nutrients so that they can be dug into the soil
more easily. During the dry season, though, they pour still-liquid sewage into dug channels, like
regular irrigation.
The economics are good. Like the outflows of sewers, latrine slops increase the income of some
farmers by thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, a single truck driver can service a population of 20,000
people, and generate an income of $50,000 a year, twice the price of a new truck.
Vishwanath says that septic tanks emptied by honey-suckers offer not only a cheap alternative to the
construction of sewers, but a superior solution - saving water while delivering fertiliser to farmers,
improving soils and boosting food production. Their services should be scaled up not shut down.
Not everyone agrees. The biggest argument against agricultural recycling of sewage - whether from
sewers or latrines and septic tanks - is that it carries disease. While urine is largely pathogen free,
faeces are rich in viruses, bacteria and worms. There are more than 2 million deaths a year
worldwide from diarrhoea and other diseases associated with human waste. Most of these are down
to poor hygiene, such as a lack of hand washing, and in areas where people still defecate in the
open. Farming or eating the crops fertilised by sewage is thought to play a minor role.
The trouble is there are few reliable studies. A rare investigation of farmers, by Indian researchers,
looked at 22 villages near the Musi river, which is little more than a sewer for the city of Hyderabad.
It found that almost half of households irrigating their fields with the sewage flow reported fever,
headaches and skin and stomach problems during the previous year - twice the rate in a control
village that used clean water for irrigation. The highest disease rates were among women who
weeded the fields.
Another study looked at what happened to the crops grown by sewage farmers in the cities of
Ghana. Most of them grow salad vegetables such as lettuces that are sold in street food and eaten
by some 700,000 people, says Drechsel. He calculates this could cause up to half a million cases of
mild diarrhoea a year, nearly one per consumer.
The instant reaction is to ban the practice. But a more practical approach would be to improve
hygiene. To maximise the benefits of recycling sewage onto land without creating health problems,
safe practices for handling faeces are vital, says Drechsel. The parasitic protozoa and viruses
present in faeces cannot multiply outside the human body so simply storing the waste in ponds
before applying it to the fields kills many dangerous pathogens as the sewage dries out. But this
requires months rather than weeks to be fully effective. Things can be speeded up by sprinkling
wood ash or rice husks over the faeces, or by adding other alkaline materials such as lime. In
combination with washing salad vegetables before sale, this can eliminate more than 90 per cent of
the health risks, says Dennis Wichelns, principal economist at IWMI. Incinerating the waste destroys
all pathogens and parasites, but it reduces the nutrient content. The problem, Wichelns admits, will
be finding ways to encourage farmers and food sellers to adopt such practices.
An end to flush and forget
The best way to grab most of the advantages of nutrient and water recycling without imposing health
hazards is to treat sewage before giving it to farmers. A typical sewage works will remove obvious
solids like sanitary towels, and leave the rest to settle to the bottom of ponds, before using bacteria
to eat some of the organic material. These processes can remove most pathogens while leaving
behind most of the nutrients.
Irrigating with treated sewage effluent is increasingly popular in developed countries short of water
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too. For example, Israel uses around 70 per cent of the treated effluent from its sewage treatment
works for irrigation.
With more intense chemical treatment, sewage effluent can be reused for drinking. In Singapore, for
example, they have branded their treated effluent NEWater. "It is cleaner than regular tap water,"
says Yap Kheng Guan, senior director of Singapore's water utility. While most of the NEWater goes
to industries that need very pure water, such as microchip manufacturing and pharmaceuticals,
some is added to the city's drinking water reservoirs. Orange County in California filters treated
sewage through rocks beneath the county, before pumping it up to fill the taps of more than 2 million
residents. And London's drinking water has typically been drunk several times by people living in
towns upstream of the river Thames, each time being cleaned up and returned to the river before
being extracted again.
The truth is the days of "flush and forget" must come to an end, even in the developed world. We
should be recycling our faeces and urine in the same way we recycle scarce metals. In some places,
that will involve advanced technology. But in much of the world that is a long way off. And where
water is in short supply, even flushed sewer systems may be an unaffordable luxury. For billions of
people in developing countries the best option, both economically and ecologically, may be septic
tanks, the honey-suckers and the return of the sewage farm.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Flushed with success"
Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist based in London
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication
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