getting our shit together

In March I get to stand up in front of 300 or so of my professional peers and talk about shit. The brief is to make people think. They're after"a sincere but engaging delivery – minimal text, mostly images, humour encouraged. "

And what can be funnier than taking 15 minutes to talk about poo?

Here's the abstract I submitted:

 

Composting of both food and human waste. As an ESD consultant it seems to be the final frontier. We have lots of conversations about energy, water and indoor environments, but not much about minimising or dealing with our waste outputs. It’s often seen as too yucky, or something that polite people don’t talk about but it’s a fundamental of civilised life. Great civilisations in history didn’t get great until they had dealt with large scale sanitation issues.

The topic would be introduced by a review of city wide sanitation through history: Romans, Medieval, Tudors, Victorians, Edwardians and developing countries today. Then, using these examples from the past, combined with the technology of the present, I would review the opportunities and alternative design solutions to examine how we could realistically transport and process human waste within the constraints of the modern apartment or office building

Brain dump of stuff I want to talk about/check the facts on/find pictures to illustrate:

History: prehistoric people don't shit in their own cave, romans used water to transport poo, people in castles poo'd out the window and got other people to clean up their mess, uses for poo and wee, Lonsdale St and other cesspits, how it worked when I was a kid - the dunnyman, the impact of sewage systems on city design, 3 hole privies,  fertilising fields with poo,

Health: how people dealt with poo and then got sick, miasma, cholera, worms,

Modern: 1930's instructions on how to use a flush toilet, african country that's buying urine off people to encourage them to use state built composting toilets, Chrischurch and disasters in modern countries that are worse than they need to be because we rely on electricity to pump our poo, Indian women who have to walk for 10min to find somewhere safe to poo, Natural Event and their work at festivals and Haiti, My composting toilet setup, pics of poo compost after 12 months,

Biological process stuff: wee is almost always hygienic, poo doesn't smell bad if it's dry, Leave poo on its own/with a carbon source for 12 months and its pathogens are gone. How much poo does a human make in a year? Can you mix poo and vegetable composting? Don't mix wee and water.

Imagining buildings and cities without a water based sewage system; How much poo storage do you need for an apartment building to process its own waste? What about an office building? What can you do with the urine? What about collection systems - bring back the dunnyman? What does a modern bathroom with composting/collection look like? Do you need a service corridor like the laneways of old? What about cleaning? urine separating toilet pedestals. Can you use a compost tumbler in the basement to reduce the volume for transport - how big does it need to be? what to do about urine salts.  Using historical methods in a modern city. Resilience.

Whew!  I'll probably think of more.  I'll add that later.  For now I can console myself that I've started.