The Night Soil Man
Night Soil, is untreated, uncomposted human excrement (aka raw poo). It was commonly used as a fertiliser on farms in the United Kingdom until around 60 years ago. It’s still used in some Eastern countries today, but comes with health risks as raw human faeces can be a vector of human to human disease transmission.
Today, research has shown us that the composting process will eliminate the potential risks of using human ‘waste’ as a compost ingredient, rendering it safe, and additionally, compost is generally better for the soil than manure (better structure, less nutrient run-off etc, greater bio-availability of nutrients to the plants etc.).
Using a compost toilet is not taking us backwards hundreds of years – we apply modern scientific rigour, knowledge and understanding so we know that composting is an essential and desirable aspect to dealing with human ‘waste’ and turning it into a safe and valuable resource.
Creating and using ‘humanure’ compost will be an essential aspect of a natural, circular, regenerative and fossil-fuel free economy in which we can start to balance outputs and inputs.
The Night Soil man of old has had his day (thankfully), but the day of the composting toilet is just dawning!
The biggest challenge is changing peoples attitude towards non-flush toilets!
If you’re interested in more of the history of night soil, this website has lots of information, images and photographs:
Side note: there is some doubt that the photo above is actually of a ‘night soil man’. I read online (link unfortunately now lost…) that he may actually just be a chimney sweep. Either way, the image captures the feeling and plight of the poor workers – let’s not let this level of inequality happen again!
Up to sixty years ago they may have been removing raw sewage from toilets for agriculture but now have up to date analysis for our processing of human waste through our HH-2 units. No harmfull organisms or pathogens have ever been found in our end product, HH-4.
With all due respect, your HH2 system is incredibly expensive at £6k. For domestic-scale users, a ‘hot-bin’ compost bin would achieve the same results or am I missing something? There’s no real indication on your site of how your HH2 works, but it appears to be a pair of large, stainless steel insulated compost bins. A domestic user would have trouble filling that at a suitable rate for it to work, but I can see that where you have a number of compost toilets, a communal system like this would be useful, although currently in the UK, I do not know of any.
Thanks for the mention!
David
thegardenhistory.blog