Potty Talk

In keeping with the childish theme of rewriting Christmas Carols, I read over on New Scientist that there's a particularly egregious and difficult to stem form of environmental pollution in which we are all engaged.

Using the potty.

According to the article, "Despite making up only 1 per cent of the volume of waste water, urine contributes about 80 per cent of the nitrogen and 45 per cent of all the phosphate. Peeing into the pan immediately dilutes these chemicals with vast quantities of water, making the removal process unnecessarily inefficient."

The article goes on to describe (in a lot of detail) the sewage disposal system and how, unless you're a green European you're pretty much destroying the environment one flush at a time.

The only part I'm unclear on is once you've separated the urine from the "grey and black water" (eww!) and put it into tanks where "microbes" break down the nitrogen and phosphorus, what are the actual by products of this whole effort? According to the diagram on the website, the "sludge" (again eww!) is either brought to a landfill or incenerated. Isn't that contributing more methane (a potent greenhouse gas) to the atmosphere? What they really need are the methane convertase bacteria which I suspect we'll find any day by a hydrothermal vent in the deep ocean.

So just in case you were feeling self righteous about driving your Prius or not even owning a car (like me) remember that you're no different from that Hummer driver, every time to pop a sqat.