Pee-Pee and Poo-Poo

I don't like pee-pee or poo-poo much, because they're yucky. I do have a weird fixation on them when it comes to sustainable living though. For some reason, sustainable sewage treatment really turns my crank. It's probably partly because I'm keen on getting stuff for free, but also because I'm not keen on throwing stuff out. Eat, crap, and flush is about the same linear process as make, use, waste. Linear sucks. It's not at all energy-efficient. Since pee-pee and poo-poo are the two most common wastes we humans have to deal with (they become less common when we don't have our fibre in the morning), I guess that's why I'm so fascinated with how to make use of them.

I got to thinking about building houses lately, and started costing out a geodesic dome. As an aside, I don't think there is much of a cost saving in building a dome over a long-house style greenhouse, but that's a topic for another day. To make a long story short. I discovered that a 20x100' long house at the back of four rowhouse units would be a rather clever dual use of foundation walls and would allow for the back wall of the greenhouse to be planted with strawberry towers or a folkewall style structure. It would also, depending on the cost of glazing, be less expensive than a geodesic dome... and a hell of a lot easier to build. Sorry, dome guys, I'm just not converted.

So, my main interest in this folkewall/strawberry tower thing would be the treatment of greywater. As you may or may not know, greywater is wastewater with little to no organics in it. It comes from washing machines, dishwashers, sinks, and showers, to name a few places. It's basically water that you would normally let wash down a drain that hasn't got any pee-pee or poo-poo in it. Earthships use in-house greywater filtration based on living machines. I envision a similar indoor greywater trough filled with air-cleaning plants along the south-facing wall of each unit, through which all greywater will filter. Soaps and their ilk will be cleaned out of the water by the micro-organisms around the plants' roots. The then cleaner greywater can be mixed with urine and run through the folkewall in a dilute form. But how to get the urine separate from the faeces?

Enter the low-flush urine diverting toilet. As you can see by following all the links, the idea is not a rarity anymore, and it appears there is even an economy of scale - the highest priced unit is around 800 bucks. These units can be hooked into a simple reservoir for urine, and then that urine can be pumped in a measured way into the greywater that's cleared the first filtration trough. The key to using urine in this way is that it needs to be diluted, and since it, well, smells like pee, you want to keep it in a sealed container... and I think applying it to the folkewall through vermiculite laced with biochar would probably be a good way to keep the place not smelling to Hliðskjálf . Luckily, the WHO has already thought about the safety of just such a proposition, and they explain how best to handle human waste in their (aptly named) "WHO GUIDELINES FOR THE SAFE USE OF WASTEWATER, EXCRETA AND GREYWATER" publication. Convenient. Plus, other people think about this stuff, too. You can see a whole host of links to urine in agriculture here.

Since urine is pretty pathogen-free, its direct use (after minimal treatment) is reasonably safe and efficient. The problem is the pathogen-laden faeces. Luckily, those diverting toilets can lead to numerous different local treatment systems. The low-volume flush means less water to become leachate, and allows for better composting of the waste in composting units. As you can see, composting toilets are now more or less mainstream; they've got commercially available systems for automatic composting of humanure. There are other systems that produce useful byproducts: the Anaerobic Baffled Reactor, Methane Digester, and Biogas Settler all produce biogas for use in stuff like gas ranges. I have noted previously that bubbling biogas through an algae bioreactor would make it sweeter by pulling some of the CO2 out of the mix.

The matured compost can be spread on fields, but it would probably be better to run it through several other digestive processes before doing so. Putting it through a vermiculture operation would be a no-brainer, as that should provide further bacteria and fungi to break down the already pretty broken down organic solids. By putting both urine and faeces back into the food production cycle, the macro and micronutrients that are normally flushed down the toilet go back into the soil and food system. That's a good thing, and it means we go from a linear eat-crap-flush system to a renewable cyclical system. That's good. That's pee-pee and poo-poo.

Wages and Subsidies: the Sri Lankan Case

I was talking before about a simple model of an economy with food as the basic component. I had said "... food fuels labour, labour fuels industry, industry fuels growth, and growth fuels the economy". It's totally simplistic, but when it comes to economic models, simplicity can be a blessing. Since any population increases over time, that population needs to bring more land under cultivation and requires more inputs to increase production. The prices of those inputs (under the current industrial farming paradigm) sadly track oil prices, so the cost of cultivating more land more intensively fluctuates. The tendency, as with all non-renewable and scarce resources that are being extracted more and more intensively, is always that price increases over time.

Food cost is a major consideration for a huge proportion of the global population. Excepting we in the super-rich West, people tend to spend the largest part of their salary dollar on food. A tiny increase can be telling. I remember during the War in Sri Lanka when the cost of coconuts rose drastically. I remember saying at that time that it didn't matter how many southern Sri Lankan sons died in the conflict up north, the next election would be decided on the price of a coconut. Coconuts, being a staple food in Sri Lanka, were a daily necessity. The careful shredding and use of coconut meat in such delicious (and ubiquitous) foods as pol sambol:

...necessitated a constant supply. When the price went up, news programs were filled with stories of ladies going to the market to purchase half a coconut where before they had easily bought a whole one. First of all, my mouth is watering just looking at that picture of pol sambol (that is some GOOD food). Second of all, hunger is a primordial signal to the human body that something's wrong. If you're hungry, you're motivated. You can even say that euphemistically: if someone is "hungry" it means they have an objective in sight and will do anything in their power to get it. Hunger is one of the things that can create unrest, so it's to be avoided if at all possible.

How did this play out in Sri Lanka? Let's remember that this is a country terminally short on capital. The basic and fundamental source of the value of the Rupee was (and likely still is) foreign currency reserves sent home from the Gulf States where Sri Lankan women work as housemaids and men work predominately as cooks. Without this influx of capital, the Rupee would be utterly meaningless. As a matter of fact, I was completely unable to exchange Rupees for dollars anywhere outside Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan government was always short on liquidity and paying for war materiel is expensive, so, on 21 July, 2007, Ag Minister Nanayakkara announced a program to expand food production through land grants. No money was available, but the government could give up land for production so long as the companies gave back profits and financed the industries themselves. Food (and fuel) imports, it was understood, bled the economy dry of foreign currency reserves:

Sri Lanka spent US $ 2 billion only for food product imports during 2006. The country spent the same amount of money on petroleum imports, a commodity that cannot be produced locally.

The problem with Sri Lanka, as with so many other developing nations, is that it is a victim, to a degree, of its mercantilist past as well as the IMF's idiotic focus on cash crops for the purposes of economic development. On little island, stuff has to be imported. Better it be luxuries than staples. Luxuries you can live without. Staples, not so much. Sri Lanka got it backwards, exporting tea and workers for food, and keeping wages low locally to keep more seats at the local cotton-gins.

The land-for-profit-sharing under Minister Nanayakkara clearly wasn't getting the desired results in the pipeline because in November of 2007, King Dutugemunu himself announced further subsidies for rice farming and an elimination of VAT on rice purchases. Another problem was the breakup of prime coconut land (which is predominantly also scenic coastal sandy territory) which was also solved by fiat:

The government was also planning to ban the break up of coconut land and putting them to alternative uses. There is a strong political lobby to prevent coconut land being in fast developing areas for purposes which generate a higher economic value.

Still, in early 2008:

Coconut production rose by 3.0 per cent during the year benefiting from favourable weather conditions but the prices of coconut and coconut based products increased sharply reflecting the world trend of increasing demand for organic oils to produce bio-fuel as a supplement to expensive fossil fuel.

The concept of coconut price going up in response to biofuel production is a canard. The Rajapakse regime maintained a very tight control on the media, and dissenting presses found their machinery sabotaged if they dared violate lèse majesté. Some journalists have even been kidnapped or shot and hacked to death for these violations - so when reading SL media be certain to take the pro-government bias with a pound of salt. The cause and effect are plain: coconut prices rising, reliance on foreign currency for war materiel as well as oil and food, government attempts to stem the conversion of coconut plantation to luxury hotels by fiat, further increases in price of coconut. Would there be a wage increase commensurate to the cost of food?

2009.08.26 No, there won't.

2010.01.24 Election promise: there will be private sector wage increases!

2010.02.11 Maybe they'll fulfil election promises?

2011.01.11 No, the promises won't be fulfilled. We've also run out of money for subsidies!

That the government is forced to stave off hunger by subsidising the increase of agricultural input and subsidising the cost of food seems like a really unsustainable idea. As a matter of fact, that's how it played out in SL. Sure, you can offset the costs for a little while, but in the end, you'll run out of money. The sad part about all of this is that the reason for keeping food costs artificially low is to maintain wage competitiveness. Wage competitiveness is all about luring industry, and industry comes not to better the country it sets up in, but to exploit lower operation costs. Labour is a major consideration. China has been a great beneficiary of this as well. I know another government that is running out of liquid capital due to war expenditures, but at least it produces its own food. How much of that food is bought locally? How much of the cheap food is imported? What if there was to be a sudden down-valuation of the US dollar that increased the cost of that low-cost food? The knock-on effects of relying on food imports and low wages are rather profound.

So, when we are talking about industrial inputs, we are talking about raw materials, labour, and energy costs. Labour is a huge cost in the developed world, and a portion of the cost of labour is the cost of labour's input: food. If food prices go up (which they basically must... food production is finite), then labour costs should go up. The only way to stop this from happening is to intervene artificially in how the market sets prices. When labour says they haven't got enough food to live, and industry says they haven't got enough money to pay salaries, should it be government's place to perpetuate the low cost of labour by subsidising food production? Should it be government's place to allow the weak corporations to survive? Should we let the exploitation of labour and government continue at the hands of industry?

We need to stop subsidies. In the end, many subsidies simply perpetuate bad business practices by enabling industry to keep the cost of labour low. That sends the wrong price signals, and bases our economy on a dream rather than reality. As we all know, dreams come to an end.

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education | Video on TED.com

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education | Video on TED.com

I'm in love with this guy. While the idea of simply letting kids run amok with computers doesn't really fulfil a lot of fundamental educational needs, this concept of self-organising systems and emergence as a source of self-powered education is wonderful.

Ecosystem Discovery: Top 10 plants to remove toxins from the interior o...

Ecosystem Discovery: Top 10 plants to remove toxins from the interior o...: "Indoor plants have proven a precious tool in the battle against the increase levels of indoor air pollution. Scientists from the NASA have f..."

This is totally useful. I need to save this link.

Working... Working...

I noticed that my most recent post appeared with a date of last month. If you haven't seen it, it's right here.

I've been enjoying making greenhouse layouts lately. Mainly they are just fanciful.

But some are reasonable.

I'll keep at it for now. Designing the water flow in aquaponic systems in order to minimise the number of pumps needed is kind of fun.

Organic Farming in India

A marvellous article in the Guardian today on organic farming in India.

For all those addicted to fertiliser and pesticide, chew on this (to paraphrase):

First, there's a 10% to 20% premium to be earned by selling organic products abroad

Second, organic farming slashes cultivation and input costs by up to 70% due to the use of cheaper, natural products like manure instead of chemicals and fertilisers.

Third, western, modern farming has spoiled agriculture in the country. An overuse of chemicals has made land acidic and hard, which means it needs even more water to produce, which is costly.

Read the article, it's a perfect and pragmatic rebuttal to the need for fertiliser and pesticide. Those tools only help agricultural companies, not farmers.

Water and Food are Strategic Resources

When people talk about strategic resources, they typically mean a few bits of materiel reserved for use in the event of the outbreak of war: uranium, titanium, and oil lead the pack. Oil is the sine qua non of modern strategic resources. Without it, no military can operate. It has been so since the Second World War. But before the WWII there was a saying: "an army marches on its stomach". Did we forget that adage, or was it simply taken for granted that so long as we could fuel the lines of supply there would be enough food? The latter sounds right to me. Food is taken for granted, whereas before, it was central to military affairs. How now? Is food important as a strategic resource? Does its scarcity have the ability to destabilise populations? Are national policies put in place to control the distribution of and access to food? Yes, yes, and yes.

Recent events in the Middle East have pointed to a deep and abiding need for democratic reform. They are signs that grassroots populist movements can rise and demand regime change. But what methods are used to keep down these uprisings? Well, there seems to be a clear pattern:

2008 MAR: Yemen - "In March 2008, in the middle of a world food price crisis, the cost of wheat more than doubled in the space of four months, leading to weeks of protests and riots across the country. In the past two weeks, the price of wheat in Yemen has risen by 45 percent, and the cost of rice by 22 percent, according to the World Food Programme. The value of the Yemeni rial is also in decline, while the U.S. dollar is increasingly difficult to come by in the capital."

2008 JUN 16: World Bank gives Yemen $100M to lower food prices (the Houthi Rebellion has gone on since 2004, but aid came only after food riots in March)

2011 JAN 14: Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali pledges to reduce prices on staples of bread, sugar, and milk

2011 JAN 16: Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah orders food distributed for free for 14 months. As of yet, no Kuwaiti uprising has materialised.

2011 JAN 20: Jordanian Prime Minister Samir Zaid al-Rifai announces increased subsidies on heating oil and food.

2011 JAN 30: Hosni Mubarak orders maintenance of food subsidies.

2011 FEB 04: King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa of Bahrain orders increased subsidies on food

And so on.

Even after political change has been won, there is a further problem to be faced: political freedom does not emancipate the poor from poverty. In Egypt now, the decision to end subsidies may triple the cost of staple bread. Subsidies are touted by governments as a way to redistribute the wealth and give the poor more buying power when it comes to the daily necessities. I can understand. I have said it before, the basis of any decision to work for a low wage is predicated on whether I can feed my babies or not. The inability to do so would instil me with vitriolic rage or abject hopelessness. The haunt of hunger is the home of hyperbole. Given the opportunity to live on a meagre wage, so long as my kids were fed, I might choose to eat bitterness and shovel my 16 tons. Subsidies might keep the peace, and ensure adequate food gets distributed to the poor. Still, something is missing from this picture.

Subsidies are funny creatures. We think that they are geared at helping people live from day to day, helping people feed their families. But who actually benefits from them? Now that we've seen the natural progression of thinking for a regular ordinary bloke trying to feed his kids - from despondency to the capacity to bear poverty - what can we truly say subsidies have done? They've driven down the cost of labour, that's what. Subsidies are passed directly to corporations by increasing the public's capacity to bear poverty. The alternative, as we've seen, is rioting. But is it the fault of the government for being unable to provide adequate subsidies, or is it a problem of labour being underpriced?

Subsidies may be defined as helping the poor buy food, but let's call them what they really are: a stopgap measure to address the structural failure of an economy to distribute wealth fairly. Price controls on foodstuffs (and other consumables) are the same thing. Why should the nation tread the razor's edge between deficit spending and riots? In a constant balancing act between two extremes, the key is not to play one side off against the other, but to move the razor. I would much rather balance between a wall-mounted LCD display and not having a wall-mounted LCD display rather than balance poverty against hunger.

And yet, here we are. Subsidies were necessitated by wages that never increased while the price of everything else did. Therein lies the secret to the source of a great deal of hyper-wealth: the disparity between growth in wages and growth in prices. If wages had increased with the price of food - an essential input to labour - then I wit there would be far fewer hyper-wealthy individuals out there, and governments would have less of a deficit. As it stands, we've eaten ourselves into a hole... and done so by spening the money we should have had lying around to dig ourselves out.

So, food fuels labour, labour fuels industry, industry fuels growth, and growth fuels the economy, right? Well, except that growth of the economy will equal greater consumption of those basic consumables, which makes them more scarce, which should make them higher-priced. But if the join between food and labour is based on a subsidised price, then that price signal will not be correctly interpreted by the market. The cost of food stays low, labour stays low, industry stays low, but growth continues (and makes the wealthy extra wealthy!). Which means the price of stuff should be higher... but there's this fantastical wall of subsidy that makes the price of food imaginary. So consumption increases because of growth, and growth doesn't cause a price increase in food, so production of food has to be artificially stimulated to keep up with growth. If price increase doesn't happen, production increase isn't naturally incentivised! The government has to do it itself. Enter agricultural subsidies.

What's already a drain on the treasury has become an even greater drain, precisely because the treasury was being drained to begin with. In this way, an ongoing cost begets and ongoing cost. The government gets trapped propping up its labour and agricultural sector, and where does the money go? Industrial profits. Agricultural subsidies increase supply of food, food subsidies maintain the low price of food, which maintains the low price of labour, which allows for a bigger profit margin for industry because while the cost of goods is going up, the cost of labour stays the same. Subsidies are a band-aid solution to a structural problem. If you leave a bandage on for too long, your wound can fester, but ripping it off is a temporary pain. Sadly, there isn't a single government in the world that wants to be the one that stops subsidies. In an autocratic system, you've already seen what happens... and when the proverbial faeces hit the proverbial impeller, the leaders there reverted to doing what's always worked before when there were problems with the plebians: they gave them bread. This last time, it didn't work (except in Kuwait). In a democracy, the government that removes subsidies doesn't get re-elected. There we are, stuck in a pickle where food prices can't increase to temper demand, where the government can't pull out of the incessant need to subsidise food, and can't stop artificially stimulating the supply of food. Until now.

Now, we hit a wall. Now we tap out our aquifers. The Middle East is the natural place to begin the adjustment to the reality of market forces because the aquifers won't replenish themselves. With subsidies reaching the extent of their ability to keep up with actual food prices, food production is getting to the point where artificial stimulation (including the massive irrigation projects of the gulf and Maghreb) by money can't push yields any higher, and growth runs into the wall of economic reality: eventually, the market undergoes a correction.

The Arab Spring is a great and noble thing, but we need to learn our lessons from it as well. This is certainly more than a market correction - it was a humanitarian correction - and it continues as I write. But Egypt and Tunisia are the first to emerge free of political oppression only to find economic repression there waiting for them. The first to find out that all those subsidies and economic smoke and mirrors cost ungodly amounts of money. The correction happens now, and higher wages are going to be the order of the day, or history will repeat itself. The wall that economic growth is hitting is not imaginary; it is quite real. Only when the real cost of food is known will it become a matter of importance. As the Middle East has shown, food is a strategic resource. We can't afford not to pay for it.