The future of drinking water?

[Spider Jerusalem]

(I feel vaguely ill now.)

Drinkable turds have saved the fortunes of troubled Japanese municipalities, according to Weekly Playboy (3/9).

Many Japanese municipalities like tiny Tenkawa in a rustic part of Nara Prefecture were hit hard by the London Convention, which bans the dumping of human waste in oceans from July 2007.

But, thanks to Kunihiko Yamamoto, the president of an Osaka water purification company, they can now pooh-pooh their problems with a scatological soda.

"The village of Tenkawa generates 1,500 tons of human waste a year. We used to use a tanker to carry that waste to the sea and dump it. But we can't do that any more. We needed to come up with a new method of treating human waste, so decided to treat poop biotechnologically to turn it into drinking water," Tenkawa Municipal Government Environment and Hygiene Section Manager Haruhide Morita tells Weekly Playboy.


more...

http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/0402/0227crap.html

[MercutioATC]

1. Hey, fecal material is food waste, dead cells and water.

If they can extract the pure water, it's just pure water....

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. Yeah...

it was the part about the end product retaining a faint shit-coloured tinge from "bile pigment" that makes me feel sort of ill. But, as supplies of fresh water become scarce, such concerns won't matter so much...

[MercutioATC]

3. It kinda grossed me out, too.

Did you see the commercial for some water filter that aired years ago where they tool a tank of REALLY nasty water and opened a tap that had been run through the filter and poured a glass of drinking water? Gross, but it makes sense, when you think about it.

Overall, I prefer not to know where my water comes from :)