[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Your Crap, Our Compost

[Bill Totten]

Squat and the earth shall grow

by Sisi Tang

In These Times (July 20 2009)


Poop. 


A generally fecal-phobic society reacts to the thought with a mix of
snickering interest and fearful aversion, all dispatched in a single
flush. But Nance Klehm, 43-year-old urban forager and grower, transforms
human excrement into nutritious soil one bucket at a time. 


Klehm's Humble Pile, a local do-it-yourself human waste composting
project, introduces a backyard alternative to the machine-churning,
power-draining waste-processing facilities tucked away in remote
locations. 


"I'm not treating it chemically. I trust microorganisms to do it for me",
Klehm says. 


In early 2008, Klehm sent letters and humorous surveys to households in
six Chicago neighborhoods, calling on potential participants to help
"transform waste into fertility, pollution into resource, and isolation
into connection".

With no need for "Compost 101" instruction, complex machinery, electricity
or water, Humble Pile asked its 22 volunteer "nutrient loopers" to opt for
dry buckets with snap-on toilet seats when nature calls. 


To the surprise of Lora Lode, whose household participates in Humble Pile,
her two teenage children Kira and Charlie were the most eager to take part
in the minimalist procedure. The family of four made room for a bucket in
the bathroom and for storage drums on the back porch of their Logan Square
apartment. "I was interested in this as an experiment", says Lode, who
works with artists to combine art, activism and environmental concerns.
Her nineteen-year-old son Charlie is not put off. "I just think that if I
didn't have a house, this is what I would do", he says.

In place of the routine flush, Klehm supplies the "nutrient loopers" with
sawdust to cover stools after each deposit, both to dispel odor and to
facilitate composting.

In the summer of 2008, Klehm personally collected the feces from the Lodes
and other households and composted the material in 32-gallon drums, stored
at a secret location outside the city so as to avoid prosecution for
violating ordinances on waste disposal and storage. 


"As an ecologist, I don't expect law to keep up with me - it's more
important to get this done", Klehm says.


Nature doesn't seem to heed law either: Shit happens, and then goes
through a two-year-long natural composting process that burps out
nitrate-rich soil that smells like wet basement. The soil will cycle back
into Chicago gardens, which include a 5,000-square-foot greenhouse at a
homeless shelter and several additional gardens scattered throughout the
city. 


"I'm just interested in people understanding that their body is producing
soil all the time", Klehm says, "and there's no reason not to return it
back to earth".

According to Klehm, the locally produced Humble Pile compost is as
nutrient-rich as sludge "fertilizer" from municipal sewage plants. "Good
soil is so hard to have in the city. I'm concerned about the state of our
soil - they're affecting our health, they're depleted, or they're
contaminated or poisonous", Klehm says. 


Deemed a fertilizer by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the
controversial sludge is a concoction of everything that goes down the
drain - a heavy-metal laden medley of industrial, pharmaceutical and human
waste. (In an attempt at linguistic detoxification, the EPA renamed sewage
sludge "biosolids".)


Klehm's composting method has another home: an abandoned World War Two-era
US airbase. In the salt flats along the Nevada and Utah border, Klehm and
other artists and researchers of the autonomous living system Clean Livin'
use urine-diverting dry toilets and a combination of composting and
dehydration to process their waste for later agricultural use. 


Long before Humble Pile, the waste-to-fertilizer process was discovered
inadvertently by our nomadic ancestors, who flung waste onto piles that
eventually became fertile soil. Later, the Sumerians and Romans hired
delivery boys to carry feces in "honey wagons" to nearby fields for
fertilization. The Chinese even commoditized "night soil" from wealthier
households as a valuable good - the feces of the rich being more abundant
in nutrients due to their better diets. 


But now, just as the Western commode is making its widespread debut in
China, Klehm is showing at least two US communities that there may be a
better option than the water-hungry modern flush toilet. Producing soil
and fertilizer locally helps conserve energy and water, and whereas the
composition of municipal sewage sludge is to a large extent a mystery,
what goes into Klehm's buckets are participants' own work. What's more,
Klehm ensures that her do-it-yourself fertilizer is safe by testing it for
E coli bacteria. 


For Klehm, Humble Pile is not a novelty. "I've been doing this for four
years", she says. "Other people think it's crazy. I just accept it as a
way of life." 

_____

Sisi Tang is an intern at In These Times. She emigrated from Hunan
Province, China, to the United States, when she was nine. A student at
Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, she is also
pursuing degrees in history and Asian and Middle Eastern studies. A dancer
and music-lover, she is always on the lookout for a good read and a good
eat.

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