Journal Entry Week 11

Poop can be a good thing for many different reasons. Poop can be used for fertile soil, thus good for growing crops, and can lay the groundwork for a business market, whether that’s for selling these crops, selling poop itself, or for growing food for livestock. Either way I believe that this market can be highly profitable. It is also great for using poop within a bio digester system, for powering household items like gas for cooking, electricity, and heat.

On the other hand, poop can be extremely harmful. Open defecation is still a major problem everywhere in the world not just developing countries, and can harbor lots of bacteria including E. coli, salmonella, and giardia. In addition, our current methods to dispose to water that we use to flush down our waste is also extremely wasteful. When we do this, we flush away our waste, then that water has to be treated with heavy chemicals in order for it to be clean enough for our tap and to drink, and then the cycle repeats itself. This process is extremely expensive and time consuming, and can be halted if we just implement more efficient systems that are sustainable.

Human poop if not reused in some sort of sustainable way, can also add to the harmful air and water pollution problem. This is due to people dumping waste in rivers and other bodies of water.

What is also downright disgusting about poop is that most of what we consume (harmful materials that we are usually not aware of) including micro plastics, that cannot be broken down, end up in our poop. Therefore, if we are dumping this waste into the environment, we are also harming other living things, such as fish who will mistake micro plastics for food, and then die because of our stupid mistakes.

Journal Entry 13 Ind 14

I think for the future of the toilet, we will have to revert to a composting toilet, because water will be limited if not gone altogether. The composting toilets will work on a place like Mars, where there it is known to be mostly all dry land. We can have multiple purposes for the poop we exude, including using it for soil in order to plant crops in order to survive. The movie “Martian” exemplifies this situation, although I do not know the exact scientific evidence behind it to know if it would actually work. We can also implement a bio digester in order to generate gas for cooking and electric. I think this would work, especially for a community that definitely doesn’t already have an installed toilet system. I also think smell can be a problem on Mars, because there aren’t a lot of natural resources already around to cover up the stench.

It’s extremely scary to think about a world without water, so as for the future of toilets on earth, if we can conserve water as much as possible, whether that is using a greywater system, a double flush option, or even composting, it can slow down the water scarcity problem.