Liquid Gold - ‘Grow With The Flow’
Speaking of ‘flow’, I seem to have the writing bug today. Funny how some days it just…well…flows, while other days its like frozen molasses (is that how you spell ‘molasses’?).
Ok, this is a bit of a delicate topic for some (I would imagine), but hopefully we can all keep our minds open and hold hands as I carefully walk us through it. We’re all adults after all and this is a blog on a mission - a mission to get people revved up about sustainable living.
Here we go…
I bought a book a couple weeks ago called, you guessed it, “Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants” by Carol Steinfeld.
Aside from being a person who prides himself on maintaining a very open mind, as you must certainly know by now I have a serious passion for waste management. Truth be told, I’ve been curious about the use of urine as fertilizer for quite some time now. You see, unlike some other human waste (a.k.a “#2″), urine is typically quite sterile in healthy people, and is a great source of plant nutrients - of course this is certainly not to say there aren’t some ‘green’ options for #2 as well (but let’s save that for another post).
So why do most of us poo-poo pee pee, you ask? (I can’t believe I successfully incorporated ‘poo poo pee pee’ into a coherent, semi-mature sentence!)
It just comes down to ‘guilt by association’ I guess - what goes in the toilet STAYS in the toilet!
Well as I discovered in this book, there is no good reason for it to be going in the toilet (conventional, water-guzzling toilets anyway) in the first place.
I found “Liquid Gold” to be a very enjoyable, fact-packed, unique read from cover to cover. Carol Steinfeld takes us through four main sections (aside from Intro) - “Urine lore”, “Unexpected Urinals”, “Science and Technology of Using Liquid Gold”, and “Gold To Green”. I found the last section to be particularly interesting, since this is where she provides a number of ‘real world’ case studies.
Super book - I highly recommend it! You can buy it from the Liquid Gold site (see link below or image above), and Carol is even signing the first 100 copies she sells.
She signed mine “Shift Happens! -Carol Steinfeld”
I love it!
Here is a blurb about the author (from the Liquid Gold website) in case you are curious:
Carol Steinfeld is a writer, researcher, and resource-recycling specialist who writes about ecological resource management solutions. She is the co-author of The Composting Toilet System Book and Reusing the Resource: Adventures in Ecological Wastewater Recycling. As projects director for Ecowaters, a nonprofit public information project, she conducts workshops worldwide. She is currently working on a new book.
Technorati Tags: urine, gardening, fertilizer, plants, nutrients, waste, composting, sustainable living, toilet, poo, pee, book reviews
Written by Bentley on December 5th, 2006 with
no comments.
Read more articles on Interesting & Notable and Waste Management.
- [+] Digg: Feature this article
- [+] Del.icio.us: Bookmark this article
- [+] Furl: Bookmark this article
