The average person produces about four hundred pounds of excrement annually, so with more than seven billion people live on this planet, that equates to 2.8 trillion pounds of human fecal matter generated each year. Consequently, we need to spend considerable time, effort, and expense managing all this waste lest we find ourselves in very deep…
However as Lina Zeldovich explains in her new book The Other Dark Matter; The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health, the ways in which we manage all this waste are not only expending valuable resources we could be using for other things and harming the planet’s environment in the process, they are also depriving us of the many benefits we could derive from it as sources of energy, fertilizer, and even the ingredients for ground-breaking medical treatments.
While not perhaps the most supper-conversation worthy topic for some (not yours truly, of course; the conversations that have been held across our table don’t even allow this one to make the top fifty on the squeamish-0-meter), it is unquestionably one that – given the ever-increasing human population belaboring the planet – merits our attention if we are, ecologically and sustainably speaking, to prevent finding ourselves collectively up a famous creek without a propulsion device. Ms. Zeldovich’s new book looks to be an excellent way to introduce ourselves to it.
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