Nature "wastes" nothing. Everything is broken down and reused. The importance of waste in the natural balance of the ecosystem is highlighted in a couple of featured findings. One, highlighted in Wired magazine, demonstrates how whales act as the oceans' gardeners: "When a blue whale goes, it goes big." The phenomenon was recently captured on camera, as shown below:
While hard to be precise from photos, it is estimated that the deposit is nearly as long as a full-grown blue whale, making it, perhaps, "the world's largest documented poop." Jokes aside, it's important because it supports "a line of research pursued in recent years by marine biologists who say whales are the ocean's unappreciated gardeners, playing enormous roles in nutrient and carbon cycles. In short -- or perhaps in long -- their poop helps make the aquatic world go round."
Go on. Well, whales help fertilize their surface waters which results in more plankton, more fish, and ultimately more whales. In fact, biologists Joe Roman and James McCarthy, have proposed what they call "the whale pump: a mechanism describing how whales feeding at depth carry nitrogen to warm, energy-rich surface waters, discharging it in flocculent fecal plumes" that float and stimulate the growth of plankton and everything that eats them.
Source: Wired
Naturally, human progress has messed with this process. Roman and McCarthy calculate that before commercial whaling, "the whale pump distributed three times more nitrogen across the Gulf of Maine than entered it from atmospheric sources." That may be the reason sea life in the Gulf was once so abundant. Even today, with whale populations only a fraction of historical levels, they added more nitrogen than all the rivers and streams running into the Gulf combined!
But there's more...as aquatic plants and animals, particular plankton grow, they absorb carbon, then bury it on the seafloor when they die. In other words,
carbon sequestration! Biologist Trish Lavery estimates that defecation by the Southern Ocean's sperm whales ultimately sequesters some 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year, helping counter global warming. So basically, whales are like trees when it comes to
carbon credits.
But it's not just whale poo that's valuable. Human excrement can be just as useful. They say in ancient Rome, "
no human waste went to waste." The average adult flushes away 730 liters of urine per year. As featured in the esteemed journal Nature, there is now a number of projects in Europe and the U.S. that is seeking to separate urine from the rest of sewage and to recycle it into products such as fertilizer, a practice known as
urine diversion. Human urine has market value of $14 billion per annum, based on the amount of key minerals in it used to make synthetic fertilizers. Moreover, fertilizer plants also use a lot of energy to run, particularly the bad fossil-fuel kind, and contribute to pollution. Wide-scale use of urine diverting toilets could mitigate energy shortages and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists are hopeful that "separating urine from sewage could mitigate some difficult environmental problems, but there are big obstacles to radically re-engineering one of the most basic aspects of life." Like persuading people to use eco-friendly toilets and getting over the idea of eating food watered with your neighbor's pee. But at least we know the process is scalable, since everyone goes! Can't wait till Wall Street starts trading pee and poo credits.
