Islands
I'm grateful to Tim Mars for sending me the following snippet: B-)
"A toilet that pays its users has been opened in Musiri, Tamil Nadu, India.
"It is the first of its kind.
"The public toilet, in the town of Musiri in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, gives users as much as 12 U.S. cents a month for their excreta. Fæces are composted and urine, which is 95 percent water and has already passed through the body’s own filter, the kidneys, is collected, stored in drums and used as fertilizer for bananas and other food crops in a two-year research project by the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.
"‘The day that I can use your toilet and you pay me instead of me paying you, that will be the day when we have really learned to reuse our waste,‘ says Santha Sheela Nair, India’s secretary of drinking water supply."
Here's the Full Story
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That's really interesting- I've always wondered about most societies' reluctance to use human waste as fertiliser and recycled water- once the germs are out, it's the same stuff we ingested, minus only a little. I noticed in China that the public toilets in the countryside always had a garden next to them that the maintenance person fertilised with the rotted waste! I just worried that children might catch a disease from playing nearby. Urine is a great green fertiliser- we are always looking for ammonia or urea to boost crops commercially.
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