Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 December 29

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 29

Hickman High School, Columbia, MO

I was reading the history of Hickman. I graduated in 1964 and saw in the history that a swimming pool was built there in 1955. When my sisters and I went to school there from 1962-1966, there was NO swimming pool. When my brother attended Hickman from 1969-1972, they had a swimming pool. So apparently the pool was built sometime between 1966 and 1969. Could you please find out when it was REALLY built and correct that? Thanks.

Connie Sommer Class of 1964 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cdsommer (talk • contribs) 17:22, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Hello, Cdsommer. Unfortunately, while the article Hickman High School is in general well-referenced, that section ("Campus") is nearly useless because it has no references that you can go and look at for more information. Looking at the article with WP:WikiBlame, it appears that that text was added by User:Grey Wanderer in May 2007, so you might ask them on their user talk page (or they may come here looking, since I have just pinged them). --ColinFine (talk) 18:39, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Using dried poo poos as fuel

Would it be either feasible or practical to collect your own poo or that of your family to dry, and then use as a fuel for heating and cooking. Minus the obvious taboos, it sounds like an awesome idea. But I also wonder if human poos are worth the outlay. Maybe we don't produce enough to make this practical. However if this was the case, how about a high output diet with the sole purpose to produce as much as humanly possible? Flushing all that stuff down the toilet seems like a terrible waste. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.236.100.51 (talk) 18:31, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

The answer is yes. Have a look at the "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge", mentioned in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation article. Dry animal dung fuel also has some information. --ColinFine (talk) 18:43, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Aha, yes saw that but that is more aimed at developing countries. There doesn't seem to be much suggestion of doing as I mentioned in the west, despite a growing Green movement here. Which is a shame as Western diets are generally richer. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.236.100.51 (talk) 19:00, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Well, there's the smell and potential to spread disease. Drying implies a large quantity of air would be made smelly during the process. Perhaps if you had a lot of empty land area to work with, in a dry climate, you could have a system to spread it out and let it dry out of the range of any noses. However, such a system, along with the recollection method, would likely cost more than the benefit. It would also smell again when you burned it, so then you'd need to use it to heat a remote location, like a barn.

Arctic and antarctic locations might make it more practical for use as a fuel. First off, fuel there is often scarce, so any source of fuel should be explored. And freeze-drying could be used there. That just requires leaving it out to dry. This could take quite a long time, but it won't smell much, being frozen. Spreading it thin will make it dry out faster.

A more practical usage is as fertilizer for crops. The potential to spread disease is still there, though, so non-food crops, like flowers and corn for ethanol, would be better choices. Another concern with human waste is that it may contain unmetabolized medications, which could then enter the food chain if used in edible crops. See night soil. Also, sewage treatment systems may very well extract chemical fertilizers, such as nitrates and phosphates, from raw sewage.

As for eating more to produce more fuel, that's a bad idea. The cost of the food would be more than the fuel value, and it could have negative effects on the health of the people, too. In some cases it may make sense to burn food directly. For example, I had some walnuts that bugs had gotten too, and they burned quite nicely. StuRat (talk) 19:23, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

In modern western society with a working infrastructure, one can automate the process and do it large-scale. As I understand it, it's not at all uncommon for modern sewage treatment plants to use a multi-level process which generates biogas and sewage sludge. The later can be either be composted and used as fertiliser, or dried and burned in incineration facilities. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:41, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Using the sewage sludge directly for food crops would risk recycling medications through the food, and biological risks of contamination would exist for farm workers, in any case. StuRat (talk) 20:47, 29 December 2014 (UTC)

Drying in air is not the right way to do this. There are a couple of problems with it. Firstly, many compounds usable for fuel are volatile and will evaporate as part of the drying process, losing some of the potential energy content. Secondly, the presence of oxygen leads to oxidation of some compounds during the drying process. Since oxidation of those same compounds is the process by which energy is released, this also reduces the chemical energy available in the waste. This aerobic energy release is why it is quite possible for piles of dung to smoulder or even catch fire in the right conditions. What you are looking for is called Anaerobic digestion. It is somewhat more complicated than drying, but it is also quicker and results in a considerably higher energy output.

In general, it is better to carry out this process on an industrial scale which then feeds the energy back into the electricity grid or gas network than to do it in the home. The reasons are many, but include:

• Economies of scale - buying one big plant is cheaper than many small ones;
• Hygiene and safety - keeping hazardous waste away from residential areas;
• Re-use of existing infrastructure - houses are already plumbed into the communal sewage system. Doing it at the treatment plant requires changes only at the treatment plant; doing it in the home requires changes to every home; and
• Possibility of other recycling opportunities - water recycling is the big one, either for domestic potable use or, with somewhat less effort, for irrigation. But there are others; for instance, there are noticeable quantities of heavy/precious metals in sewage which it would be uneconomic to extract at the domestic scale but which could perhaps be usefully extracted at industrial scale.

Depending where you live, there is a moderate to fair chance that a lot of this is already going on. GoldenRing (talk) 00:15, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Another process is just to form a large pile and let it rot, collecting the methane given off by it as it does so, and also collecting the heat it generates. Once done, the remainder could be used to fertilize non-food crops. StuRat (talk) 00:22, 30 December 2014 (UTC)