Recently, Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection came down hard on an Amish school. It had an outhouse, used by 20 students. The waste in the school’s outhouse was periodically collected in five gallon buckets and dumped on fields, where it was plowed under and recycled as particularly good fertilizer.
This was alleged to “pollute the ground water”, and became an object of much concern among those with enough time on their hands to worry about such things.
For six or seven thousand years, human waste has been recycled as fertilizer. Chinese farmers fortunate enough to have fields near roadways would build the most comfortable outhouses they could to attract passers-by to use them, willing to make that investment for free fertilizer.
Now, centralized sewers simply dispose of all the nutrients in waste. That makes fertilizer companies very happy because they get to sell more fertilizer. It also makes taxing authorities happy. Munincipal budgets are based on being able to impose what is, in essence, a tax upon going to the bathroom. They do not want people to use outhouses and septic tanks, because they can’t be easily taxed.
The Amish, with their outhouses and recycling of the contents that accumulate therein, are a threat to that funding because they prompt many to say: “If the Amish are able to recycle their waste, why can’t we?”
To that, of course, there is no logical ans
II
Numbers.
There are about 550,000 cows, 1.2 million pigs, 23 million chickens, and 4 million turkeys in Pennsylvania. They produce 44 billion tons of waste each year, most of which is spread on fields and plowed under to provide a source of nutrients for crops.
The 12,000,000 people in Pennsylvania produce another 44 billion tons of waste each year. It is “processed” in sewage treatment plants where its nutrient value is removed.
While this 44,000,000,000 tons is wasted, Pennsylvania farmers have to buy 100 million tons of fertilizer every year.
The 20,000 Amish in Pennsylvania produce 7,300 tons of outhouse waste each year.
The only minds that would see problems with using that for fertilizer have to be wired for lies.
