Fertilisers

We can fertilise our food. Each one of us is pooping and peeing something that could fertilise half or maybe all of our food, depending on our diet. That dark brown poo in the toilet is dark brown because of what? Dead stuff, bacteria. That's carbon. And carbon, if we're getting that into the soil, is going to bind to the other minerals and nutrients in there. Boom! Healthier food. Voilà! Healthier people. Chemical fertilisers by definition don't have carbon in them. Imagine if we could move our animal manure and our human manure to our soil, we might not need to rely on fossil fuel-based fertilisers, mine minerals from far away. Imagine how much energy we could save. Now, some of us are concerned about industrial pollutants contaminating this reuse cycle. That can be addressed. But we need to separate our discomfort about talking about poo and pee so we can calmly talk about how we want to reuse it and what things we don't want to reuse. And get this: if we change our approach to sanitation, we can start to slow down climate change. Remember that carbon in the poop? If we can get that into our soil bank, it's going to start to absorb carbon dioxide that we put into the air. And that could help slow down global warming.