Say you want to use this substance on the plants in your own garden. What are the logistics? What techniques to apply? What dilution if any should be used?
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As Paracelsus said many centuries ago, the dose makes the poison. Trace amounts of antibiotics are not the same as working amounts of antibiotics. Heck I remember teaching my daughter about the gorgeous looking baneberry. You can taste the fruit with your tongue and it makes the point of contact tingly, from the same compound that would stop your heart if you ate a couple.
I looked up the excretion rate of cipro, one of the most common antibiotics. On one hand about 25% of the used dose is excreted. But then the average toilet flush is 2.2 gallons, the average person flushes 5.5 times a day, and next thing you know that 25% of a daily dose is diluting in about 12 gallons of water and decomposing like everything else. But if somebody manages to ingest a fresh 12 gallons of toilet water they could theoretically get a quarter of a dose (which at that point they will desperately need). That is, if he could get it strictly from somebody taking antibiotics; ever other person not taking them would further dilute the batch.
I’m more concerned with heavy metals and complex molecules that do not readily decompose and are freakishly active free radicals.
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Brought it up because real world situation in Kansas we can get antibiotic run off from commercial farms. Its usually not that its the waste run off thats the bigger problem. Excessive nutrients in the water supply. I realize it’s different but if someone didn’t know they would never guess 1000 cows get antibiotic everyday. I’m glad there are not thousands of cows beside me. There are lots of cattle raised in this area but when done right its not a problem. Southwestern Kansas has been having some hard times. They are losing thousands of cattle due to heat. These lots of cattle are huge. They could collect lots of cow urine and it might be safer on a large scale. Heat stress blamed for thousands of cattle deaths in Kansas | PBS NewsHour . Here is more about that Industrial Agricultural Pollution 101 .
IRRC it was such an antibiotic run off that was blamed for a particularly virulent strain of coliform bacteria that contaminated canteloupes in California (?) - antibiotic resistance had developed in the bacteria and the fields were irrigated with contaminated water.
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Totally agree, unless someone is taking far more antibiotics than they should be, diluted amounts in their urine would hopefully not be much of a concern. FYI though, current EPA guidelines are for 1.6gallons or less. Residential Toilets | US EPA
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For individual use i agree 100% . It’s not the amount of antibiotic alone it’s the fact that it’s there at all regarding commercial application. I’m saying everyone wants to reuse waste but it doesn’t scale in my opinion to commercial application. As an example in California they need to figure out how to not have antibiotics in that water in my opinion. It makes me wonder what do they do now? They are the experts not me so consider they might have it all worked out by now.
Yeah, that’s a whole different beast right there. That’s why I said that I felt more comfortable with low level human waste, which is what I was talking about, than from industrial farming waste.
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Anybody remember the ‘Flush With Power’ episode of King of the Hill?
Maybe I shoulda posted this to Comedy?
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Regarding the beef this is an interesting read from a cattle rancher who raises them traditional
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0zq8qx7sqyiLTvLXhkGAu7ZJv74eLz9exPiUoFwWb4D7eGmbh2X98zr9RkgedbxcAl&id=111191305630142
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We don’t throw any cardboard or paper away either. It’s carbon, and when not concentrated and deeply buried, it’s good for the soil. My only point in mentioning it, is that with so many examples the discussion in the public square frequently centers on only one set of facts.
There is a very popular farmers market in a wealthy city close by (Overland Park). They mandated all vendors stop selling produce in plastic bags because, it’s assumed it’s the most green. Of course people can bring their own cloth bags (customers have always had that option) but as a farm marketer myself few of my customers bring their own reusable packaging, so it basically boils down to paper or plastic. Again my whole point in using this example is that, as with pee-cycling, key factors affecting the environment (energy used to transport) are frequently left out of the discussion.
Again, at face value, this sounds nostalgic and better for the planet. But I’m guessing you haven’t considered the extra weight it takes to haul glass around, and the affect it has on fossil fuel usage. Or the extremely energy intensive process used to make glass vs. plastic.
As a kid I worked at a grocery store, so I know the time it took to sort all the different glass pop bottles, the storage space required to store the empties, and most of all how heavy the wooden crates holding a case of empty bottles. As it turns glass isn’t as environmentally friendly as one might imagine.
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Your right I had not considered energy that goes into glass bottles since we used to do it. Like the old paper milk cartons that were wax coated seem like a great solution. From my perspective I would love us to get to the place where things are instantly recycled. Imagine if every house had a built in cardboard , compost paper chopper. If every bathroom had a urinal only and then regular toilet would that help? Maybe a button to channel where the waste went. Imagine if every property had a sewage treatment pond or two. A glass grinder that turned glass to sand. Metal shredder for aluminum and steel. Imagine we no longer needed or had a trashcan.
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Sadly the more we move into the future the more backwards we become. Side stepping a bit; technology keeps making progress in leaps and bounds, yet most of what we buy is of worst quality than decades ago. There are some exceptions but in general it is cheaper to trigger our consumerist ways with things other than actual quality. In the realm of ideas it is close to the same; information is at our fingertips at a second’s notice, and yet we are even more ignorant than before. “Plastic, bad”, “paper, gud”, is just simple, un nuanced, and “progress”.
Honestly all they need to do is not to retail any disposable bags and sell most things in bulk (a nightmare to those tasked with triggering our consumerist ways as packaging is marketing). If you want to buy plastic shopping bags you can buy all you want; they only come in packs like trash bags. Grains and dry goods would only be bulk dispensed into plain bags. Some will keep buying disposable plastic bags but when you have to bring your own bags or else, you’ll eventually gravitate towards making it a better bag whose handles don’t even break on you. Heck if your cereal, gains, sugar, salt, flour, baking soda, etc, all was dispensed from bulk, it would make all the sense in the world to use glass at home for storage, it lasting forever. Instead we make everything A: disposable (The real problem regardless of material), and B: of indestructible stuff (to compound our stupidity, falsely claiming that it could be recycled).
How about we just move away from the need to recycle altogether? The “convenience” of buying a box of cereal painted in garish colors protecting an individually wrapped bag inside (convenient mostly to the marketer selling it to you) is the problem into itself.
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The shopping you describe is here today - at local food co-ops. So much better.
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I know, but it is still a tiny miniscule niche. I don’t even what to look up how much cardboard and plastic the Post cereal company uses in a single year.
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We grocery shop Aldi and Costco. My wife takes her own cloth bags to both. When I shop by myself I just use the case bulk boxes the dry and canned goods come in. Neither sells groceries in paper or plastic bags.
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If I had my way just about nothing would be sold in their own individually wrapped retail package. I have my non disposable shopping bags, but the problem is that a single cereal box has more impact than all the disposable bags I don’t use. Just about everything with a brand name generates unnecessary waste.
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I’ve been using free pee fertilizer for years in my vegetable garden. Obviously you don’t spray the leaves or fruit but instead carefully water the base of the plant with a diluted solution. Another use of urine is to make excellent wood chip based “soil”. I get free wood chips delivered from the local tree service company and during the winter months when nothing is growing dump urine on the pile. The urine is high in nitrogen and other nutrients which accelerates the composting process. Within a year you have real nice rotted wood chips that work for dressing around vegetables or trees. Not sure if it’s high in nutrients but is very spongy and holds a lot of water. This is actually the first step of the process in making potassium nitrate for traditional gunpowder. In medieval times urine was a valuable resource that was collected in communities for this purpose.
As far as practical guidance, the below article is very helpful in answering many of the questions regarding application rates and effects at least in a small scale in the garden.
http://www.ecosanres.org/pdf_files/ESR2010-1-PracticalGuidanceOnTheUseOfUrineInCropProduction.pdf
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The state of Maine has prohibited disposable plastic shopping bags and stores sell alternatives for a nickel, usually a cheap fabric one that won’t last long. It would be interesting to learn if those will become a problem in landfills due to them not breaking down. Everyone just needs to bring their own bags, like most of the rest of the world has been doing for centuries.
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