Eyes bulging, Gerry Roslie howls that love makes travel (Have love will travel). Over 70 years old, he burns a surprisingly young audience with his Vox keyboard. The Sonics, a formidable rock'n'roll group that appeared in 1964, are heating up the Espace Michel-Berger de Sannois, in Val-d'Oise, in this spring of 2017.
The concert is amazing, the noise deafening and the energy intact. Freddie Dennis, the enraged bassist, shouts with a lively skinned voice, in the language of Shakespeare: "There are guys who like water / There are guys who like wine / I like strychnine ".
Personally, I prefer beer and it's time to get rid of it, after living in my body for almost an hour. I join a bathroom reserved for men. And there, a revelation appears to me. I am squandering a considerable fortune. I produce a testclear powdered urine failed liquid so precious that it was the object of a special tax from the first century of our era, in the year 70.
Emperor Vespasian was then looking for new sources of revenue for the government of Rome. He had noticed the important trade and small trades linked to the harvesting of liquid gold, of human origin. Urine, with its high ammonia content, was then the only known fixer for textile colors.
The dyers made great use of it. They also used it to degrease sheep wool. The contents of the latrines therefore represented a strong fiscal potential. To his son, inconvenienced by this nauseating administrative act, Vespasian replied by tripping a few gold coins from this tax: "You see that it is liquid!" And he launched this eternal maxim: pecunia non olet . Money has no smell.
Renaud de Looze, in a small manual (1) which encourages the manufacture of organic fertilizers, distinguishes three kinds of flux: blue gold, our daily water, black gold, solids, and yellow gold. Composed of 95% water, its dry extract contains an interesting amount of nitrogen (noted N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K). When the body is saturated with these minerals N, P, K, it releases the excess into a fluid which in turn could fertilize plants. Because these three components are the essential elements for the development of plants.
We must face the facts, organic fertilizers of animal origin come either from slaughterhouses (dried blood, bone or horn powder), or from the digestive system. Using human products would therefore make it possible to form the virtuous circle of food, eliminating all waste. Farewell flushes, lavatories and urinals!
It would be the end of a century-old sanitation industry that views human fluids as ultimate waste. As early as 2005, Joseph Jenkins, an American ecologist specializing in compost, warned about this mess in a book (2) which has just been published in French:
Jenkins even invented a word to describe this prodigious deposit: humanure (from human and manure), or fumain (from manure and human) in good French. Each individual produces, per year, in their urine, 6 kg of "recoverable" minerals.
That is 4 kg of nitrogen, mainly from proteins, 1.4 kg of potassium, 0.4 kg of calcium, 0.3 kg of phosphorus and 0.15 kg of magnesium. These figures are to be multiplied by the 7 billion inhabitants of our planet. For Jenkins, it is clear that the human body is a mine of wealth abandoned by our prejudices about the loathing of excrement.
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