BS: Sludge for Free!

Subject: Sludge for Free!
From: wdyat12
Date: 19 May 01 - 03:49 PM

How many of you organic farmers use free processed human waste to enhance the soil to grow your crops? Give us some good reasons why. I'm working to promote the recycling of human waste to produce methane to run my automobile to get to work. Is this a bad thing?

wdyat12

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From: gnu
Date: 19 May 01 - 06:10 PM

It's your call. Pun intended.

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From:
Date: 19 May 01 - 06:37 PM

oh please don't. I am sure it must be illegal. If it was something like non-food crops, like forests or something....there are too many pathogens.

mg

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From: MarkS
Date: 19 May 01 - 10:38 PM

Not necessarily a bad thing, but the total amount of energy you consume and the total cost you pay for that energy will probably be greater than the amount and cost if you merely bought gasoline to do the same job.

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From: catspaw49
Date: 19 May 01 - 11:19 PM

Yeah, but Mark.......gasoline is not a "renewable" resource, whereas Sludge is, uh.....................well............there's plenty of it, ya' know?

LOL

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From: wysiwyg
Date: 20 May 01 - 12:03 AM

If you can tie this in with the Mudcat Pledge Drive, you can definitely count me in.

~S~

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From: SeanM
Date: 20 May 01 - 03:26 AM

Sludge DOES generate inordinate amounts of lawsuits and hot air.

There's a great debate going on over sludge production out here in Riverside County, CA. Seems a local plant overproduces from what their permit allowed by a few thousand percent, and every time they are successfully shut down they sell the plant to a mysteriously appearing 'new company' that then does the exact same thing...

Don't know how you could use that to run a car though. Unless... y'know, most sane or rational people or objects would run if they saw the pack of lawyers attracted to that mess...

M

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From: catspaw49
Date: 20 May 01 - 09:37 AM

"What kind of lawyer would represent sludge?"
How many kinds are there?

Spaw

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From: paddymac
Date: 20 May 01 - 10:10 AM

While a starving graduate student, filled with an awsome fear and respect of/for Mother Earth, several of us pooled our sweat equity and decided to build a garden, made rich by liberal doses of free dried sludge from the local sewage treatment plant. We wound up with half an acre of tomatoes of all sorts. It has always amazed me that tomato seeds could pass through so many people and the aerobic digestor plant, only to sprout in our garden.

Nowadays, the preferred "organic amendment" hereabouts is used compost from the local mushroom farm. Now that is good stuff, and, it's "seed free".

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From: Bat Goddess
Date: 20 May 01 - 10:16 AM

My understading is that the main problem with processed sewage sludge is not pathogens from human waste (which I think the heat, etc. of the processing/composting takes care of, but rather residual heavy metals.

We have a composting toilet, or rather a cross between a composter and an earth closet (i.e., no large holding tank, it has to be dumped on a regular basis and the composting process finishes outside along with kitchen scraps, grass, leaves, etc.) I use the resulting fertilizer on mostly flower beds, since I don't grow that much edible stuff except salad fixings. Your own pathogens won't hurt you, but someone else's unprocessed waste can be problematic and therefore I think is mostly illegal for commercial use. Processed/treated waste may be entirely different.

I'm a firm believer in using biological fertilizers rather than chemical fertizers, which create dependency and actually pull nutrients out of the soil.

Bat Goddess (who also approves of using guano)

Subject: RE: BS: Sludge for Free!
From: catspaw49
Date: 20 May 01 - 10:22 AM

WEll, I dunno' how he fared on the pathogens or heavy metals, but I had a friend who had sludge spread on his lawn and up popped quite a few tomato plants. For easy lawn care, I suggest green concrete.

Spaw