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.

An Idea for an Organic Farm

So I made an open call to a group of my friends to see who would be interested in buying in to a sustainable farm. This is something of a dream of mine, and one I’ve talked often about, but not been able to be totally serious about until now. If the housing market holds up, I will hopefully be able to put together a grubstake to build a rather good house in the country. The catch is that I think it would be better if other families (specifically those with some young kids like mine) came along too. Quite selfishly, I want the clean living lifestyle with food security for my family without giving up the close socialisation my kids get in a city environment. While it’s still my own dream, the family is what’s important.

It struck me, after talking to one of my friends, that people just saw an idea and a price tag and didn’t really picture what I had in mind when I made my offer. Well, here it is in black and white: a concept for a self-sustaining organic farm… with high-speed internet (that’s important). I’ve been researching the technology and everything that I am going to talk about here is mature tech – not pie in the sky tech that might come out in a few years. This is stuff on the ground, now. As many of you know, a lot of our great energy-saving concepts came out of the gas crunch of the 70’s, so these things – while not going mainstream – have nonetheless seen improvement since then. Such things as methane digesters and composting toilets have come a long way. Frankly, a lot of this tech could be implemented in a low-tech low-cost way, but I rather wanted to use stuff that kept the comfort of modern living with the added bonus of being sustainable. Cost reductions are therefore possible with simplification, but only if necessary.

Also, I have been attempting to build a realistic plan by putting together possible alternative income streams other than crops. Growing Power is an inspiration in this regard, as they conceive of the working urban farm in terms of dollars per square foot and attempt to extend profit-making activities beyond simple food production. The modern organic farm concept is something of a highly diverse business venture, with chances to tap income streams all over the map. Additionally, organic farms have the odd habit of attracting cheap labour (WWOOFers et. al.) because they are a shared passion amongst we greeners. Spinoff enterprises include everything from cob and cordwood building courses (which serve to populate the property with guesthouses and outbuildings) as well as aquaponics and organic farming courses that would be a source of income outside the traditional farming model. With a good sized stand of sugarbush, spring tourism would be a possible revenue stream during the sap run. With existing contacts, a yearly Japanese maple syrup tour would be more than possible, and would represent a source of labour that incurs a negative cost: a revenue stream that creates another revenue stream.

So, I am not too concerned about the opportunities to derive profit from an organic farming operation. The issue then is to talk about what exactly the operation would work. My core theory is that of Jacobsian extension: the longer you keep stuff in your system, the more opportunities you have of making profit from it over and over again. The basis is then an attempt to create an almost closed loop system. A closed loop system is functionally impossible – sunlight is an external input that simply keeps on giving, therefore with that external energy source, there is no such thing as a closed-loop system. The key, then, is to make that sunlight input last as long as possible in your system and be a gift that keeps on giving.

LAND: Optimally, I see 100 acres of land with 30-40 acres clear and 60-70 acres in mainly maple. The clear would hopefully have only a small gradient, but the treed area could have a diverse landscape with bogs and hillocks. That’s my preference, but my ideas can be scaled to reality if need be. I would prefer it in a good growing region (6 or 7) but a high 5 will do fine. Access to local water sources preferred but not totally necessary.

HOUSE: The main expense of the operation, the house would be designed to qualify for a Passivhaus certification, meaning it would effectively pay for itself over the long run. Passivhaus design started decades ago (the inspiration came from a hyper-insulated house in Saskatchewan) and is the most strict energy-saving certification in existence. Most Passivhaus designs do not require central heating, even in the depths of a Canadian winter. They are heated primarily with human body heat and lightbulbs in the house. For additional warmth, there is radiant floor heating produced by a solar-powered geothermal heat pump. Since HVAC is almost totally eliminated, as are gas services and heaters, you actually save enough money to pay for the hyperinsulation. Passivhaus designs are being built for about $150 per square foot. Heating costs are near nil. The house would require hyperefficient appliances and solar panels, but again, these pay for themselves over the long run.

SYSTEMS:

This is where things get fun. The core of the farm is the people. The farm must supply food and utilities for the families, and take care of their waste products. Let’s start from the showers, shall we? Showers, sinks, and washing machines produce greywater. Greywater is dirty water that you can’t drink, but if you use the right soaps and detergents, plants can drink it. As a matter of fact, greywater treatment is a main feature of Earthships. It even occurs right inside the house, providing plants that clean the water as well as the air. The water is then used to flush toilets (because using drinking water for that is simply stupid). The treated greywater then gets flushed and becomes blackwater… that’s water, only with poo in it. The poo water goes to a methane digester, which produces both methane (natural gas) and natural fertiliser. Part of the input to the digester must be carbon-rich, and therefore sawdust and other biomass would occasionally be put in from foresting and farming activities. In order to back up the solar power units, the methane could be used to run not only the stove (with three families, there’s enough poo for a lot of methane for cooking), but a natural-gas powered fuel cell. One of these can make sure there is always enough current in the lines. Eventually the poo water becomes spent, and ends up as natural fertiliser on the Fukuoka-style grain fields. Eventually that grain becomes bread and beer, which continues the poo and pee cycle. Pee, by the way, should be separated from the poo by diverting toilets, because it is the perfect nutrient for an algaculture bioreactor – and also can be used directly on fields if diluted. Pee is really useful.

With people eating, there comes food scraps and other organic garbage. That stuff is great, and needs to be kept in the system as long as possible. Its first stop is to the black soldier fly buckets, where oodles of little creepy-crawlies reduce everything except cellulose. They can even eat meat and cheese and other milk products, stuff worms can’t eat. This system produces several products: heat, compost tea, compost, and black soldier fly larvae. There is a use for every one of those things. Heat is useful most of the time in Canada, so we’ll leave that be. Compost tea can be diluted and applied to the land as a very potent source of soil microbes to improve soil health. The compost is moved over to the next processing stage: vermiculture. Worms actually seem to prefer black soldier fly castings to raw foods, and they can process the cellulose that black soldier flies can’t. This process has been tested and it has been proven that not only are the two processes complimentary, the vermicomposting goes faster when the compost has been preprocessed by black soldier fly. This process produces vermicompost for the fields (a compost so rich that it should be mixed with other soil before applying to the ground), and compost tea. The black soldier fly and vermiculture units leave us with a surplus of creepy-crawlies with which to feed our tilapia in the aquaponics unit.

Aquaponics has been talked about before, but for the uninitiated, it’s a system that takes the best of aquaculture and hydroponics and puts them together. There is no cycling of water out of the system: fish poo fertilises planting trays, the nitrates are transformed into nitrites by the resident bacteria, the nitrites fertilise the plants, the plants thereby purify the water. The water can be cycled indefinitely as opposed to flowing through wastefully. The only input required is food, and worms and black soldier flies provide part of that. With an algae bioreactor, tilapia can also eat algae (for which they are adapted because of filters in their gills). Tilapia are omnivores that can truly eat anything. After all, they naturally occur with hippos because they can eat hippo poo. With constantly cycling and recycling nutrients, the only thing a person has to do for an aquaponics system is plant, maintain, and harvest. The amount of food produced by a small system is staggering… and it is tried and tested tech. The aquaponics system would require a greenhouse to be able to produce all year round. Yes, even in Canada, in minus 20 degree weather. How, you ask? Well, I have a mind to incorporate rocket stoves with thermal mass as well as a potential solaroof design. All possible, all tried and tested. With the aquaponics unit would come a flock of Muscovy ducks for pest control, meat, and eggs. Duck poo is perfectly welcome in an aquaponics system, and ‘scovies are at home on the range, capable of foraging and generally taking care of themselves. If necessary, chickens could be added to the system to add heat and carbon dioxide. An odd thing, you may think, to add to a greenhouse… but if it’s near airtight and plants consume CO2 to make sugars, you need a source of CO2 in the greenhouse. The added heat of the coop (as well as the eggs and pest control services) wouldn’t hurt.

A key to the functioning of the farm, then, would be water storage. A pond would be highly useful for not only water storage but production of biomass. Duckweed, a nigh indestructible water weed, is an exceptional converter of sunlight to protein, and can multiply on still water faster than you can say photosynthesis. Opening up a nice pond with duckweed on top would allow for green forage for the tilapia that can be frozen for storage over the winter. Another aquaponics enthusiast does this for his fish, and the nutrient composition of duckweed is superb for fish feed when supplemented with other stuff like black soldier fly (which, itself, is actually superior to most commercial fish feed). Additional water tanks for runoff collection would also be useful for dry periods.

What you see above is a reasonably brief discussion of some pretty nifty thoughts for just the central systems of the organic farm. A woodlot makes a great deal more activities possible, especially if it is maple. With a big enough woodlot, the income from sustainable forestry would also supplement the bottom line, and the use of a pyrolizer for heating in the greenhouse would produce not only heat but biochar – useful in making terra preta. On top of those things, an open expanse of clover would allow for beekeeping, a couple possible dairy cows, goats, you name it. That’s just gravy, as all the necessary calories are already being produced in the systems I’ve just talked about. Excess produce can be sold through the middle of winter. A little bit of cottage industry, and secondary products are also possible. Add in WWOOFers and farm vacationers, as well as weekend courses, the place can become quite an earning proposition.

So, that’s the basic idea. Any questions?

Desalination and Energy Production: at room temperature

Tsinghua University does it again: their reputation for skilled engineers is often inflated, but perhaps in this case not undeserved (page 32).

The implications: pipe seawater through fuel cells - especially if it was combined into an algae bioreactor to produce biodegradeable matter - and you produce both power and desalinised water. This was something I found when searching for a mechanism by which seawater could be used  for algae bioreactors and then provide water for use in African agriculture. This could create power, biodiesel, and clean water to bring life back to the overly arid lands now unavailable for cultivation.

Throw a little urine in there for nitrogen, and you have an indigenous source of ammonia fertiliser. Full of win.

Building from the Ground up

I'm going to try to lay out a kind of import replacement based on the kind of cities we have in Canada - specifically, Calgary. I like Calgary a lot, but it has something of a sprawl problem. This makes utilities stretch to the limit and makes stuff like garbage collection and snow removal really expensive. So, instead of starting at the city level, I thought it would be really useful to go right down to the very basic building block of Calgary: suburban subdivisions.

Developers in Calgary develop land in bite-sized chunks, each chunk designed from the ground up with a type of house layout in mind. The houses are mainly cookie-cutter mirror images of one another and very little imagination goes into their layout. What a subdivision does have in abundance is surface area. Lots and lots of surface area. Specifically, the place is covered in a wide spaghetti-mess of roads that are altogether too wide for their purposes. Also, people have pretty big houses. All of this is a disadvantage from the standpoint of cheap utility services. So I propose to handle all utilities from the subdivision level. In essence, you'd be replacing the import of utility services from the central processing centres that are currently in operation. This would make the subdivision a wholly independent entity (and, as you'll see, it will actually create exports from the subdivision). I was mentioning before that I wanted to create a business plan that would create development in phases, but would make money in each phase. Here is phase number one.

The number one import of every part of every city would have to be petrol. I propose the replacement of petrol entirely through the use of algae biodiesel. Every house in the subdivision would be able to maintain an algae bioreactor. It could be built just the same as a solar hot water heater, and each unit would take up only a percentage of total roof space. Since this kind of technology is possible for hobbyists to construct (see here and here) it's mature enough for the big time. Those worrying about freezing pipes in the -30 degree winters we know and love in Calgary need to read about Solaroof technology - an open source technology that uses low power photovoltaics to power soap bubble generators that produce insulation that is not only seethrough but provides R-40 insulation values for negligible cost. In other words, this technology is mature, cheap, and feasible.

Every house, devoting only four square meters of biorector surface could produce between 18.7 and 56 L of oil per year. In essence, one litre of algae oil is equal to one litre of biofuel (minus trace glycol). Home kits such as the patriotically-named Freedom Fueller indicate that biodiesel production is not only possible for small-scale purposes, it's already mature enough for the consumer market. I cannot imagine a high rate of conversion given the very long duration of the batch-based (more labour-intensive) production method; however, using modern ultrasonic cavitation techniques, not only is constant throughput possible, but the speed of conversion is reduced 90%.  Using ultrasonic cavitation and direct plumbing from the subdivision to a local processing plant, continuous production of algae biofuel would be possible.

This does not produce the full amount of gas required by one car for one family per year, but it does make a start at producing it. Plus, this is only on a single unit covering four square metres of bioreactor surface area. The design of bioreactors allows for a lot greater surface area of algae to sunlight, and four square metres of algae surface area would conceivably take up much less than four real square metres of roof. Finally, if the units were modular (as in the above-linked example of the biofence), they could be added over the usable area of the roof, which is an average of anywhere from 120-220 sqm. Using the rough estimate of 600 gallons (2270L) of fuel per car per year, between 40-121sqm of bioreactor would produce the gas for one car per household per year (depending on the yield of the algae strain). Since the bioreactor surface area is far greater than its footprint, this is doable on most average rooves. Heck, it would be doable at the lowest efficiency even if the footprint and bioreactor area were 1:1!

This is simply for a regular 2008-era car. If driving a hybrid, at the current levels of fuel efficiency (assuming 24,000km/year at the Toyota Prius 2010 model in-city fuel efficiency of 51mpg or 21.7km/L), and assuming the lowest yield for algae, only 59sqm of bioreactor area is required (which is equal to much less roof space). Through the use of a production coop, people who chose to save gas and take public transport would be given cash credits from shares in the local biodiesel cooperative. Persons who chose to drive would use their production credits to offset the cost of their own petrol. Persons who were not members of the cooperative would pay full price and profits would go to the fuel cooperative.

Since the design of the roof units could be modular, the cooperative members would only add capacity when they had the free capital to do so. Producers would be able to gain payback on their investment through selling their algae production, so the infrastructure has a real return on investment. Added capacity would not strain a continuous throughput system. The project could be implemented piecemeal without undoing the integrity of the investment: initial production of biodiesel could be mixed with regular petrol in order to have enough supply for the cooperative. The purchase of petrol for mixing, however, adds an overhead to the enterprise that would encourage early addition of production capacity in order to offset costs. In the end, it would likely be best for the cooperative to be established with seed capital, and extend generous buy-in terms and rebates to early adopters in order to avoid ongoing outlays for mixing petrol.

One import replaced, and on a local level. Not only would the product be carbon-neutral (it would not create more carbon dioxide than it removed from the atmosphere), but it would no longer necessitate the entire logistics chain required to get gas to the pump: exploration, drilling, refinement, transportation. Once initial costs were paid back, the system would continue to supply fixed-price fuel for the cooperative so long as there were cars to use it. If there were no cars, the fuel could equally be used in fuel cells for the generation of electricity... but that's a few phases down the road.

Biogas Purification with Algae

Ho ho ho! I knew this was possible!

Algae-Purified Biogas

A great cellular element in a bioremediation machine! Just bubble the raw biogas through algae tanks to purify it, and you've got beautifully clean methane!

The theory, which is mine, about brontosauruses...

So I was thinking about an idea of how to organise living machines in an easy, straightforward manner. The basis of my concept was kind of like the periodic table: every organism should have a little box of its own with information about its inputs, outputs, and preferred environment. For example, a brine shrimp might have a box with a number in the top centre representing the total g/cu. m. of biomass in optimal conditions. It would have a list of necessary inputs with optimal ranges on the left hand side, and the list of outputs with corresponding ranges on the right hand side. On the bottom and around the edges would be both numerical and graphical representations of the preferred habitat of the brine shrimp.

Now, I don’t know anything about biology. I skipped out on biology in High School (where I come from, you only needed two of three sciences to graduate and I’m lazy). I didn’t do any biology in University, so I don’t know osmotic pressure from a twinkie. I ran over this idea to a friend of mine who DOES know osmotic pressure from twinkies. He pointed me to this link:

Ecosystem Model

So, OK, it’s been done. Well, at least I wasn’t smoking crack – it’s a valid system of notation. My idea was more along the lines of creating creatures as building blocks as opposed to expressing the relationships in existing systems. Certainly, the concept of expressing the interrelationships in a system is very interesting, but I was going for a system that you could build an ecosystem from, not a system of representing an ecosystem that already exists.

The concept would be simple: choose a feature organism for which you wish to optimise environmental conditions. Build the services you require into your ecosystem to optimise the environment for the feature organism. Add enough layers of interrelationships to buffer your support systems for the environment. Boom! You have a cell that does exactly what you want it to. If you wanted something to raise the pH in a larger bioremediation system, you find an organism that naturally does so, build an ecosystem that supports it optimally, buffer that system, and incorporate it into your larger system.

My basic concept was for top-down design of an aquaponics system that naturally incorporates cells for the optimization of environment for nutrient uptake in both the fish and the plant side of the machine. Plants like lower pH to maximise mineral uptake. Fish prefer a pH close to 7. Why not plan for a cell that takes low pH water from the plant cell and buffers it up to 7 naturally? Once the water cycles through the fish tank at neutral pH, introduce a cell that drops the pH to 6.2 before it gets cycled into the plant segment of the tank. To be even more functional, the pH-balancing cell could include algae that provided two extra services: they could feed tilapia (they have the capacity to filter-feed), and also introduce oxygen into the system. Any plant such as algae that removes CO2 from the water removes carbolic acid, raising the pH and oxygenating the water. See, even guys who never took biology can think this crap up.

So I want to try making a more constructive rather than analytical tool for the constructing of ecosystems. The problem is, I haven’t the first clue on how to start. I guess starting this is the same as with most things: a quick search on Wikipedia…

BioChar and Terra Preta

BioChar

This has got me excited.

The problem is that I notice there are actually too many technologies now that can take food and farm waste and convert them into something useful. I worry that there will be too much competition in future for these useful byproducts, leaving people begging for food scraps to power their pet waste recycling system. I suppose it would be useful to have edible scraps digested by Black Soldier Fly, inedibles turned into BioChar, urine cycled into an algaculture apparatus, and fecal matter run through an anaerobic digester before being added to a bioremediation system. There is no end to the possibilities, and all of these business opportunities not only sequester carbon but improve soil quality and produce food...

Urine-and-Biomass-to-Algae

Creating Biochar, Farming Algae; A dynamic duo that combined gives a superior growth media for plants.

Looks like a good and simple way of making algae.