Shit Happens! Audio Transcript
Introduction
Water is a closed system. Water's not being produced, you know until I actually worked in the water industry you didn't really think about it, you turned your tap on, you know, you visited the sea, you went and walked along rivers and stuff… The stuff isn't made. Certainly, there's a recycling, obviously from the sea, you know, you get moisture rising into clouds, they then dump rain on the land, but it's not made; and that's why we've got to be careful how we use it and what we put in it.
[sound of footsteps walking on sand, waves lapping]
Our hydrologic system, so our water system in the planet, is closed. For all the water that has existed and will exist has been made and we cannot make more water.
You need to think of the waste stream, so what's going to happen downstream essentially.
[Sounds of urinating into a toilet, zipping and flushing]
[Interlude: Water is a closed system - what's going to happen?]
[sounds of running water, washing and drying hands, footsteps and a door closing]
The Basics
[Interlude: piano strings and farting]
I have used one before, would I use one if it's in a public space? I'd like to think that I would, just because, I think we just need to get over our problems with it to be honest because it's like, I mean I think it's easier for some than others I'm not trying to be like you know, ‘Get over it! Meh’, but I just mean like collectively, we know that we've got stuff that we need to do and we need to think about what happens with our waste and what happens with all kinds of our waste including our crap [laughter].
Even the Queen goes to the toilet, even superheroes, even Peppa Pig, you know? We just need to get braver, don't we, at having these conversations and like they are a part of life and it's really weird that we still find it so weird to talk about.
My friends and my husband and I - we talk about poo all the time. I think I would be totally happy to, you know, use the facilities. I can understand how some people might be a little hesitant about then using the compost from the facilities because there is, you know, a real stigma around human excrement. And I don't know what it is, whether it's just that we get conditioned to be repulsed by the smell of hue of adult human poo, but there's definitely something in like the festival toilet memory that once you've been in a really bad festival toilet you will never forget that… that odour.
Glastonbury was the first place I used a compost toilet, so for me that that smell is just like a really nice memory [laughter].
No, I think I really like the idea of composting toilet and I think it's really great to be, you know, considering how to do that in city centres as well.
I really enjoyed digging my toilet every day.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was really nice connection, to the… to the earth.
[sounds of soil, digging]
I have to admit, I'm not really um, I don't really understand the composting toilets. I haven't really ever used one I don't think.
I don't know, I mean again it's the type of thing where I'm like, I'm willing to give anything a go.
I was curious, I felt like I wanted to know it by living with it I think that's actually the best way to get to know is to live with it and have a relationship with that.
The places that that tend to have them where they're well used and well kept are rural, they’re farms where they're doing everything, managing everything in an environmentally sustainable way anyway.
The one I used was a little bit like an outhouse feeling to it because it doesn't flush and there's no water and you're like ohh this is gross.
The toilet was a bucket, with the toilet lid built into a chair. in the morning when it's time to go, you go walk up into a little bit of forest, you sit on the toilet surrounded by trees and you do your business and then you dump some leaves on it into the bucket and then you go back.
I remember we stayed somewhere and the guy had loads of land and the toilet was out in the field, that didn't have much grass in it, but it was like a portaloo on skis and underneath the portaloo was a hole and you would do your business until the hole was full and then you’d get the tractor and just drag it on, like ten meters and pull it along on the skis, dig another hole and fill it and then just have this… if you did a time lapse over the whole, I don't know three years or whatever, it would just be like this this portaloo skiing around the field [laughter].
I went to Siberia and we camped for three months. We had to dig a long drop in the forest and it's amazing how quickly I got used to it.
We did a cycle trip that left from Leeds and went up to Scotland and across through to Ireland and down and then back through Wales again and that whole time we were carrying a little trowel with us and digging holes as we went and filling them with poo and wee.
I spent kind of six months living out of a van travelling across Canada where drop toilets are what you use everywhere. So basically a big hole in the ground that gets filled with waste. Normally with a kind of shed on top and a toilet so it can look like a fairly regular toilet, but instead of the um… waste going down some pipes, it just drops straight down into a big hole in the ground.
I've visited public toilets in the… up on the West Coast of Scotland where they were about the best kept toilets I've ever seen and they were completely eco-friendly composting toilets.
In Australia there's definitely public drop toilets which are very common, pretty much - because they're in places where plumbing is maybe hard to get to - but they're public.
But I would say go to the place where it's the norm and where it's the largest scale of composting. So I would say look at Scandinavia.
I don't think I've ever encountered one in a city so that would be really cool.
We did a project in Barcelona and it was just an empty plot of land in the middle of the city and obviously it was just for three weeks, kind of installation, and we were living on site, so obviously the only option was the compostable toilet.
When I was a child in Poland there was a lot of composting toilets, but when we compare UK and Poland, in Poland there is minus thirty in winter so that was difficult for people to use that kind of stuff in winter.
It's cultural isn't it?
It's definitely cultural. There's a Norwegian professor, whose friend had a kindergarten aged child who'd grown up with a dry toilet I think, and then this child went to kindergarten and on the first day they had a flush toilet and she was absolutely disgusted, she said, ‘Why? I don't want to see my poo floating in water, it's horrible! Why are we using water?’
[plopping sounds, piano strings being strummed]
Composting Toilets
[Interlude: Composting Toilets]
I don't know how they work [laughter].
You go and do your business, and then just shove the cup on top.
So the point with the composting toilet is, it's going to have to be as simple as, and requiring as little input from the user to change their behavior, as possible.
In our compost loo, there are two containers with two loo seats. One is in use, one's not in use. The one in use then you do your business, you put it sawdust and that composts and then that's put on our apple trees, because apple trees absolutely love that. After six or nine or eight or more months, that lid is closed, that container is, cleaned out and mucks the fields, mucks the apple trees or whatever, and then you start again.
[piano strumming, door closing]
I'm a toilet maker [laughs], a compost toilet builder. A compost toilet you know reduces your use of water. It's a nice permaculture process because it's a regenerative process, you know, which gives back to the soil. I'd been very inspired by a project in County Durham called Abundant Earth. There was a certain kind of cultural movement in the early 2000s I think, which was partly around permaculture partly around land use where a group of people managed to get hold of a bit of land and start thinking about green building and sustainable ways of living. They were completely off-grid and it was really pretty rough going for many years for them but they were building compost toilets because they didn't have any running water, they didn't have any septic system.
It is a very simple structure to make, all made out of larch. It is two chambers, and then a floor above the chambers and then two toilet seats. So above ground level you've got chambers which are about, I don't know 60 centimetres high, maybe a little bit higher, so you'd have to actually go up steps, into the toilet and then the toilet seats, you know, which is actually kind of like Roman toilet style, like a bench, with two seats cut into it; and the principle is that you use one of those chambers until it's full and then you lock that toilet seat and then use the other seat and the other chamber and fill that up. So you leave the first chamber for let's say two years and then it's well composted and then you can then empty that and put it on the trees.
Importantly you need to think of the waste stream, so what's going to happen downstream essentially.
We decided to just use it for fruit trees. The thing that we were most anxious about was rodents: how to protect it from rodents getting in and so that was why we had some sort of mesh underneath and gravel which meant they wouldn't be able to burrow underneath, and then the actual chambers are lined with sheet steel.
[reverbating, elongated fart noises]
You are homing into sight of our great compost loo.
Aha, yes I think I can see where we're headed. Oh wonderful!
There's a wonderful thing here which I particularly enjoy.
Oh!
[strumming piano strings, laughter]
The soundtrack.
[strumming piano strings]
Isn’t that fantastic?
[strumming piano strings]
This just happens to be an old piano, which was deconstructed apart from this bit and then put here to… just for fun.
If you're, you know, if you're waiting, you could potentially let people know whilst also masking any sounds coming from the facilities.
[strumming piano strings]
And behind that is the two containers
[strumming piano strings]
And here we.
And here we are, and it's certainly a room with a view. As you can see, that is not in operation, that is in operation, there's the em, stardust [sawdust].
Ah! You're absolutely right, there is no smell whatsoever and I can clearly see down into the, the loo that is in use.
Yeah
And I can see, essentially…
It has been used.
Yeah, I can see earth I can see small amounts of toilet paper, and we have a bucket of sawdust in between, but it's, it's absolutely odour free, and in here we also have a water butt
For washing your hands and a bag for… things, I don't see… the poetry books no longer here, but never mind. Look at that lovely view out there.
[sheep bleating, birds chirping]
Wormeries
[Interlude: Wormeries]
So, the first project I did was called Digestive Table and this one allowed visitors to sit and dine at a kind of homemade wooden table that had a worm bin built into it, so you're in a sense, really reconnecting with how your food is made and how your food is made is all about waste being processed by microorganisms. So you, in a sense, get to eat at the same table with these organisms that are a part of the making of your food and the reprocessing. At the end of your meal, if you have any leftover waste you can kind of like open up the portal into the table and push your scraps down in there and then, you know, watch on the cameras - there's an infrared camera built in so you can watch them doing their business and they don't really know they're being watched it's like a surveillance camera - but you know, you get a sense that they're there with you while you're eating and you also really get a sense that it isn't something gross, I mean I think! I think over time people would understand that this is just the relationship that we always have, we just don't see it. So making it visible and kind of sensible is what the project was about.
The wormery will sit here but it's more just an example of, like, it will function as a bench, so it will be a seating area really, but then you lift up the lid and there will be little worms inside!
Yay!
These sort of worm ecosystems where they process my… just general household waste of food and paper waste, coffee grounds, wilted lettuce… all of the things that come through our domestic lives that we need to throw away actually goes in the worm bins for me.
Yeah that will be food waste, there'll be… there should be three compartments and then you just add food waste to one compartment at a time - the worms will eat it up and then that will also collect worm wee [laughs]. So yeah once they… they'll eat things and then you know… it will be their waste that we, like, collect, which is really rich in nutrients. So yeah, worm wee - worm tea, I think is what it's called.
The waste builds up for them which is actually just fertilizer, and it looks like this amazing rich black soil stuff, it's really rich and great for your plants. You’ve got to mix it in because it's strong fertilizer. You mix it in with your soil, I throw it out in my garden, but you do need to get that out every now and again and one of the ways I do it is through the stacking system - so if you've got like a flower pot stacking system, you could, you know, it tends to go to the bottom so then you take the bottom one out, dump it out, put that on the top.
They're not actually a nuisance, they don't smell, they're not a problem, they don't escape, you know? I have them kind of all over my home actually, quite a few in the basement, they're there in the kitchen and I have one in the living room. It made sense to just have them where I needed them right at hand in my regular life. I don't have one here now, but I used to have one kind of built into a paper shredder as well, so you could like shred your paper at your office and then, you know, they would eat paper and then you’d give them a few other things to keep them happy.
[handwashing, water running]
Reusing Household Waste
[Interlude: Re-Using Household Waste]
We don’t have a word for this. Why is why we call it ‘waste’, but I think calling it waste means that you think of it as waste and then it's ok for us to waste.
My final project was deconstructing the notion of ‘the away’ in the context of throwaway culture. So, the very abstract notion of ‘away’ and then thinking, how does this enable very concrete, very specific design principles like planned obsolescence. You can only keep producing disposable things as long as you have somewhere to dispose of them to, which is that abstract ‘away’.
We think that when we flush the toilet, that just goes away and unfortunately because we've created that distance between the treatment and the removal, people really think that you can just kind of put anything down a toilet and it's no longer your problem.
It's a pretty fundamental necessity, which we in other words choose not to see.
One of the concepts that influenced the work was the Jungian ideas of the shadow.
There's going to be some very interesting areas to explore around how people think about disgust and our body waste and I'm interested in how that could change our cultural kind of understandings, if we start seeing our body waste as something useful. That could be something I think could potentially change over time.
I'm pretty sure in Los Angeles, because of water shortages and climate change or whatever, they're already drinking their own treated toilet water, so they're basically already drinking their own wee.
There's a real ethos I think in rural communities and on farms of, ‘you use everything’ and everything kind of gets recycled and reused.
Waste paper and other kind of dry waste that you have around the home, like old dried maybe more fibrous or leaf-based material, or even some fabrics, they could be recycled and used to make paper.
Manufacturers are starting to think about that a lot more now and I think even just things like toilet paper, you can now buy toilet paper that isn't wrapped in plastic, and you can buy recycled toilet paper.
Grey-water recycling is actually using the clean water that we use to wash our hands and wash up in, that our dishwasher uses, that our shower uses, you know, it's clean water to start with but we obviously dirty it doing those washing functions. Rather than put that straight down the sewer, that can certainly be put into some sort of storage facility and then pumped out to flush the toilets and there are a lot of homes now that are being built with that grey-water recycling functionality.
We’re looking at grey-water because of the amount of roofs we have here - we're generating a lot of water.
Maybe the plumbing from the washing machine could go towards flushing a toilet or something.
You wash your hands with the water when you flush the toilet - a tap goes into a sink which feeds into the cistern.
Once bathwater has cooled it can be used directly to water the garden.
And the energy that would have gone in to clean that water you would be saving. That in itself will save huge amounts of energy that's needed to actually treat water because traditionally you would use very fresh clean water to flush your toilet and there's really no need for that.
[piano strumming, slow toilet flush]
Pathogens in Poo
[Interlude: Pathogens in Poo]
Water is a closed system, water's not being produced. The stuff isn't made, it's recycled from the sea, you know you get moisture rising into clouds, they then dump rain on the land, but it's not made and that's why we've got to be careful how we use it and what we put in it.
We cannot just stop dumping sewage, because we… our hydrologic systems or our water system in the planet is closed and we cannot make more water, so the water we drink - a dinosaur drank that at some point.
Are our sewer systems in a better state? No they're not. As far as I can tell they're still under enormous pressure. Every time there's a big rainstorm you hear of CSO's which is a Combined Sewer Overflow discharging into the nearest river.
Their job is to take what we flush and clean it and then put it back in the river because it has to go back in the river. During overflow events I've gone and you see the sewage coming out: condoms flowed out constantly, wet wipes for the other one. When we pour bleach or descaler into our drains that comes through. When we throw a cigarette end in there, nicotine is coming through - we're not treating for these things. The second that a cigarette end gets wet, the paper falls apart. All of the filter pieces which are plastic then fall apart and then those become microplastics instantly, but each one of those is laden with toxic heavy metals, chemicals, and we are seeing those chemicals now coming out in our drinking water and one of the things that people do is flick them straight into sewage grates so they go straight into our sewage system and we're not treating for it.
So we've got our contraception going into the sewers, we've got our drugs going into the sewers it's a really good way to find out cocaine use in an area or drug use. Even people who are on extremely powerful cancer drugs, if they don't use them all, flush them down the toilet - even if they just excrete them, which they will, they're going down the sewers.
The issue is that we're seeing high levels of oestrogen in our drinking water and we're assuming it's the contraceptive pill which it could very much come from, but then oestrogen is also like a leachate, or it leaches from plastic bottles as well.
I'm not an expert on it, but I imagine that in summertime the problems are higher than the wintertime because of less rainfall, and rivers are generally lower, so that's when the volumes - your parts per billion or parts per million - will go up in in the rivers there. But at the moment, there isn't really technology that can actually decompose those hormones. So the Environmental Agency obviously who regulates that, as part of their regulation now they are taking regular samples of hormone levels to make sure they meet the normal requirements. They are so difficult to remove from the current process that we have and it will be interesting to see where legislation goes on that.
Water waste is not zapped, you know? Water does naturally self-clean because of the bugs and bacteria that are in it, but they are not that successful at removing those hormones. So as and when the problem becomes more, I think there will be higher demands on water companies to do something different and that that could put the cost up for you and I, you know, on our water bills.
Waste Separation
[Interlude: Waste Separation]
The water that comes from the toilet, you know we've either wee’d in it or pooed in it: that then creates foul water and because then you open yourself up to issues with, you know, E coli and other bacteria - you need to be quite careful with foul water. What the industry uses, where there's been some very successful projects, is taking that foul water and putting it through anaerobic digestion. So, first of all that foul water is separated, so it's put in a tank where the solids all drop down to the bottom, you know the poo element, and the water element, the wee, is the on the top. You then separate the two by just drawing off the water from the top and generally with water like that you just need a lot of aeration, so put a lot of oxygen with it and naturally the bacteria in the air in the environment will break that down. Reed beds is often used, you know, as a sustainable solution where you've got long transient times, you know, for that water to be cleaned up by the roots of those reeds and then it's clean enough to be put into water course. The solid element itself, that is then put into an anaerobic digester and that's how all sewage works now work, really. You've got microbiology happening there that munch away at that solid waste and create methane, then you can draw that methane off these tanks and use it either as a gas in itself, so you can inject that gas into the low or medium pressure gas networks, as sustainable gas to be used for cooking or heating purposes, or you can use that methane to burn in CHP engines which will then generate electricity.
I mean sewage sludge is reused in the UK as well as the US, but I do think that it's problematic because sewage sludge is what you remove when you've cleaned wastewater, so it's all the dirt. It's the dregs really and I'm not sure about the wisdom of putting that on… certainly not on land that's going to be used to grow crops for human consumption, and generally I don't think that's done - I'm not sure - in the UK but, what else are we going to do with it, where can it go? We used to dump it in the sea - can't do that anymore.
You'll always get a bit of solid left at the bottom of these anaerobic digesters and the water industry itself have got their own legislation on how that's used and because that has been at a certain temperature, as long as the pathological bacteria are all killed in it, it can be then spread to land and used as a fertilizer, but at the moment the legislation requires that that doesn't go into mainstream crops that we eat, it goes into animal feed, but there's an awful lot of animal feed that's used, so you know, the opportunity there is great to reduce fertilizer as well on the land. If they've got dairy herds, you can actually take the waste from the animals and put that through the anaerobic digester itself, to generate your electricity and then take that solid matter from the bottom annually and spread it as a fertilizer.
[fart sequence]
Energising Waste
[Interlude: Energising Waste]
My background is in architecture. I was really interested in this notion of using a small amount of energy to make a big difference. What I've come to learn by working with all of these microorganisms was that relative to their size they are incredibly powerful but trying to superimpose them onto technologies we work with just wasn't useful. So, at the HBBE, I am working with the Energizing Waste prototype and this prototype is looking at using anaerobic digestion and microbial fuel cells to treat household waste on site, at source and in the process of doing so it creates biogas and bioelectricity.
So, this is all about converting waste energy, so the idea is to use a building’s own waste: food waste, any waste basically, in my view, any domestic waste and convert it to any energy storage compound and then use that energy.
The idea is that if we're able to treat our toilet waste within the home then we place less demand on the centralised sewage system which then prevents, or can reduce the amount of, untreated sewage that goes into our river system.
In prototype one we're just using a basic demonstration of an AD anaerobic digestion unit, which is normally a commercially implemented process in many places. I think the UK has several anaerobic digestion plants where they use food waste, converting that to methane and then generating power from methane, feeding it into communities. It's probably never been implemented very well in the domestic setting so we are trying to demonstrate that how it works in a small domestic setting - using domestic waste and then produce methane gas - biogas and use that biogas to convert into electricity. When we designed, I think the initial idea was also to use human waste, but I think there are some health and safety issues to deal with before trying that, So, we are planning only for food waste mainly in the beginning, not any human waste or anything - which can actually go in there.
We made an experimental biological house so we have a toilet there. Our toilet can separate liquid waste and solid waste, so liquid means mainly urine - we are separating and feeding to a microbial fuel cell, so the microbial fuel cell is making electricity from urine and also you can recover urea and other nutrients from the urine, because urine is very rich with urea, nitrogen, phosphorus which you can use as a fertilizer. So you have a dual function - we can make a fertilizer and we can get electricity, so that is why a microbial fuel cell is very attractive, but at the moment the problem is that the electricity production is not that high, to run a big vehicle or something, but you can only run a small bulbs, a fan [something] like that.
We have a stove and we have a generator which converts the biogas to electricity as well. So the biogas will be connected to the stove, we can light this stove, the stove can burn and we have a bulb which will run from this biogas.
So that's kind of what the prototype is doing, the challenge is putting that into a domestic setting, you know? Where does it go? How much space it takes up? How much energy does it produce? How useful is the amount of energy it produces? Is it even worthwhile? All of those questions.
[sounds of water running and gurgling]
I’m a biotechnologist, so a biotechnologist in the sense of not like really medical or these kind of areas but a touch more of industrial biotechnology, so I combine several aspects of biotechnology like genetic engineering, microbiology, molecular biology, enzymology, together with chemical engineering as well, to create platforms which are feasible for commercialisation you know, so that we can actually produce - let's say we're producing a chemical right now using a petroleum route - to completely transform it towards producing it via biological route, a biotechnological route.
So my area is to use bacteria as a biocatalyst [to] replace the linear flow of fossil resource into a circular flow of resources - any kind of waste, we can break that down into CO2, so if we just burn it we get CO2 or methane. So, I engineer the bacteria which can consume this CO2 or the methane or carbon monoxide for example, and then engineer this bacteria to produce any useful chemical that we normally use in our daily life that we normally produce from a fossil resource.
In my case we can convert greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide using bacteria to useful chemicals, so this is like a sustainable issue actually. So here, what I'm doing then, I'm actually mimicking photosynthesis, so we are calling artificial photosynthesis. So in photosynthesis, plants actually taking carbon dioxide and water and converting to carbohydrate. So we are mimicking the exact structure using bacteria and now UK is actually aiming for Net Zero emission by 2050, so the research actually falls [into] this kind of thematic area - how we can use nature, so naturally abundant living organisms, to convert this kind of pollutant.
So [the idea of the ] microbial fuel cell [is] making electricity from urine, because there are many bacteria which can actually make electricity from urine readily accessible, like ubiquitous, in nature. You can grow in wastewater, you don't need expensive chemicals, and you can keep for decades as a mother culture in the lab. But normally when you compete with a chemical catalyst, the performance is still low, so there's a compromise between expense and performance.
We can take any example of any chemical that can be produced using a biological route, but the biggest problem is we are so used of using petroleum routes and the infrastructure is all there in place it's cheaper, but it's not good for the environment and we are depleting these resources so there's a need to shift all the UN sustainability goals, you know every research is now focused towards addressing these sustainability goals.
Doo-It-Yourself
[Interlude:Doo Doo]
Scale. Like, how to achieve scale? A very industrial way of thinking about it is to have big vats and big networks of things, but a bit like with the shop with the machine that can do recycling there, or with a composting toilet or even a more local country milkman vibe of like infrastructural thing, then you can have an ecology or an infrastructure of locally delivered circuits rather than huge big circuits.
Where we are in Newcastle there’s an area called Ouseburn and like, our studio is kind of at the top and there's like a trendy kind of cafe thing there, and then there's a sort of like farming kind of ecospace at the very bottom. We've started like chatting between the three of us and like, my friend’s started - he's basically in charge of like, the sustainability in this restaurant and he's like, ‘Well I've got this, what can you do?’ I’m like, ‘Sweet, well I've got this what can you do?’ and then everyone is kind of chatting and then between that everyone's kind of like resolved their own issues and it's not going further than, I don’t know, like 500 metres, like it’s all kind of really self-contained. So, I think that is like a much better solution, because then also you’re kind of innovating, you’re kind of thinking and it's all kind of, just, you know, there's no one else kind of getting in the way of it. Like you were saying before about the shadow stuff, I know where it's going, it's going there, and it'll be in the ground and it's gone.
One of the things that's increasingly practical now and becoming much more commonly developed is alternative print processes. So, you know whether it's cyanotype print processing which is you know using sunlight directly or I think it's anthotype when you're basically using plants and plant juices as your print material.
Niall’s interest is the organic printing process which, he's done some screen prints in the past using mud and various different sort of natural pigments.
I was told recently that they used to sell urine for tanning leather back in the day, like the poor like in Victorian England let’s say, they used to sell their, their piss to like local tanneries.
One of the artists we’ve been working with on the exhibition, Gayle Chong Kwan, she's been experimenting with like urine dyes.
Yeah
Yeah, she was making this kind of tie dye fabric, she was like collecting all the urine from the family [laughter], but yeah I mean it looked great.
You could have like a tiny little proteinaceous bioreactor on the go that would produce a product at the end of it. I don't think that exists in nature, I don't think anyone’s ever done that. That was sort of one of the crazy ideas that I had when I started.
Something that he called the tiny urban bioreactor so he's a scientist he works with molecular biology, but his idea is that you could have this thing that sits either in a house or maybe communally in a street and it's a little bioreactor that allows you as a community or as an individual in a domestic setting to repurpose all those shades all those shadows all those things that people normally would just recycle and get rid of so it becomes this kind of recycle bin that is that actually also generates as well. So, there might be a slot within this bin that takes for example your remnants of food and the liquid run-off that comes from that and by working with certain bacteria that ferment sugars maybe some of that could be turned into either vinegars or beers. And then another section might deal with the paper and then process it into something, but he had this sort of concept for working with all these different bio-organisms to help regenerate - so it's like how could we use microbes to stop thinking of the shadows as the shadows or something like.
So, I am a microbiologist, a microbial synthetic biologist, that's my background, so I like doing lots of biochemistry things and genetically modifying bacteria and things to try and get them to do useful or interesting things for us and a lot of the work's been about trying to find new enzymes, and a new type of complex that can degrade paper waste - or cellulose which is one of the big parts of paper - and then the other strand of that has been thinking about what type of microbe we would like to put these new enzymes and things in. The way that I've done that is by isolating microbes from paper-waste, so microbes that are able to thrive on that material, so they'll be resistant to all the types of dyes and glues and that kind of thing that often makes paper waste difficult to recycle with conventional methods. So we have these new strains now that we can genetically modify to maybe try and begin turning that paper-waste into things like drugs or flavorings and solvents and things like that it would reduce what we rely on for from crude oil.
We are now doing a project called ‘Culina@OME’ and that is starting to bring in a circularity aspect there's a waste product that comes out of the anaerobic digestion process called website that is incredibly nutrient rich and can be used as a fertilizer so it's then looking at ways that we can use that fertilizer for crops that perhaps you want to produce on site which can either be used for consumption, or in true HBBE style, can we grow our own buildings? And so then the food generated that you'd consume could then go through these kind of low technology, slow-cooking fermentation processes where microorganisms are kind of your energy generator with small inputs from the energy produced by the anaerobic digester and the microbial fuel cells. So, that's kind of starting to close the loop and then obviously once you've consumed things, you go to the toilet, and it all enters the system again.
[zipping and flushing]
Cleaning as an Act of Care
[Interlude:Relationships – That We’d Have to Pick Up]
Where I started to talk about, and to think about, shit within my practice was… it was written piece, which I wrote at the aftermath of a short residency I did in the South of Spain. Then it became a performance, a sort of performance lecture piece after that, and that was a work called, ‘There's no Pecking Order in Poo’. I suppose I'm thinking like really about relationships, I suppose what are the sort of social, perhaps political contexts in which that relationship’s formed itself where we devalue a particular role.
It is difficult, I mean no one likes touching shit. I don't like it, I'm not particularly comfortable with it, I don't want to look at it, I don't want to smell it.
When it comes down to it I don't know if I could actually stomach it but it depends really I guess.
Obviously if you're caring for a child, or a relative or a pet, or your livestock on your farm, there's always a kind of an intimacy about dealing with poo, but there's also that vulnerability isn't there?
Mothers looking after babies, people looking after their elderly parents, people in the hospitality industry that clear up after people, cleaners.
I’ve worked in like pubs and bars and restaurants.
The plumbing in the house in which we were staying in, in this hamlet, yeah basically just couldn't handle toilet tissue so yeah, daily there was this kind of collection of em, of… you know, I guess like… shit stained toilet paper within a particular bin, and it was someone's like duty two or three times a day to sort of take this out.
One of the old places that I used to work there was… we used to have like outside furniture and all the homeless people would realise that the heaters were left on a lot longer, so they'd come and stay, sort of, overnight on these benches and every morning for about three months we’d come in and there'd be human poo in the smoking area that we'd have to pick up.
If you're in a city centre, if you're in a public environment and you're going along with the capitalist rituals of public space, then you have access to toilets. If you're at the harsh end of those particular relationships then, and you want to access a public toilet, you're going to find it very difficult.
[piano strumming, deflated fart]
I can’t remember, it’s a quote maybe? It's like, ‘None are less visible than those we decide not to see’.
It is difficult to get people to be proud of working in wastewater even though they are absolutely key workers, essential workers, emergency workers and they should be paid far more than they are. They're basically behind the scenes firefighting and the only time they see themselves come into the public consciousness is when something goes wrong.
[piano strumming]
Although I think they're kind of proud of their work - the flushers who I've met, who go down the sewers and maintain them and clean them and well, clear blockages - I don't think they'll be going to, you know, out to the pub or dinner parties and proclaiming how much they love their job. So, that's difficult if you have a job that's considered to be, by the general public, disgusting, because they think anything to do is shit is disgusting, and I understand that because shit smells and it smells because it's a potentially dangerous substance. So you know from an evolutionary biology perspective it should smell, but of course that is not really a job attraction, if you're working with a stinky substance. Lots of them told me, you know, ‘People think that firemen, firefighters are heroes and they think that police are heroes and they think that ambulance drivers and paramedics are heroes, but they don't think we're heroes’ and so they're in their own niche really doing what I know and you know and they know is extremely important work, but not getting any public recognition.
[water running and plopping sounds]
In the developing world, where they are trying to reduce things like childhood diarrhoea -which kills nearly a million children a year - I think they do have pride, and I think there's definitely been a change over the last 10 years, in how working in sanitation - or they call it ‘WASH’ now, so that's Water And Sanitation and Hygiene - that has definitely got more visibility in the development world. It still gets a pittance of the funding that clean water gets, but it's definitely improved and people who work in WASH - I think that acronym has been helpful, because it's a nice clean acronym isn't it? - so you can say, ‘I work in WASH’ but you're actually, you know, dealing with shit.
[fart sequence]
We see it as waste but actually it's quite a valuable resource.
There's something around the value in our waste and getting across that idea that when depositing in the composting toilet you are contributing something good to the earth.
Some kind of really really positive version of a bank
[laughter]
Yeah
Where you make deposits and then people can take, or maybe the garden can take, withdrawals
[laughter]
Gardening, being outside, kind of just doing things with your hands is also very good for your well-being and mental health.
I really enjoyed digging my toilet every day.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was really nice connection to the earth.
I've been shoveling shit since I was a kid basically, so… shovelled all kinds of poo, so for me it's not a problem [laughter]. I actually grew up on a farm so shit and poo and waste is like, absolutely like been ingrained into me…
[laughter]
Well not ingrained, not physically!
[laughter]
Outro
[words for poo and wee]
Shit Happens! Audio Contributors
Alison Smith, artist
Amy Youngs, artist
Andrew Gardner, Waste-Water Consultant
Andrew Wilson, artist
Brian Degger, artist and scientist
Carmen McLeod, social scientist and researcher, HBBE, Newcastle University
Charlie Derbaer, designer/researcher and participant in KCL workshop
Christo Wallers, artist (and compost toilet builder)
Connor Quill, artist
Dawn Bothwell, curator, The NewBridge Project
Garry Villiers Stuart, founder member of Burnlaw Community Centre, Northumberland
George Stewart, Overlay Press, producer of Shit Happens toilet paper zine
Hannah Platt, East Street Arts
Henry Sanderson, East Street Arts
Jesse Paul Wright, artist
John Allan, scientist and researcher, HBBE, Northumbria University
Jon Wakeman, East Street Arts
Kate West, East Street Arts
Laura Purseglove, curator, Science Gallery London
Louise Mackenzie, artist and creative lead, Shit Happens project
Maciej Machlajewski, Director Stork General Construction, participant in KCL workshop
Matilda Nyau, artist/gardener
Naresh Kaushal, artist and participant in Kings College London (KCL) workshop
Nicolas Henninger, architect
Pippa McLeod-Brown, architect and researcher, HBBE, Newcastle University
Rajesh Bommareddy, scientist and researcher, HBBE, Northumbria University
Randa Kachef, Waste and Environmental Researcher, Kings College London (KCL)
Rose George, writer and author of The Big Necessity
Sarah Li, artist
Shafeer Kalathil, scientist and researcher, HBBE, Northumbria University
With thanks also to our anonymous contributors and special thanks to our supporters:
Overlay Press
East Street Arts
Kings College London
The NewBridge Project
Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE) at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities
In memory of Garry Villiers Stuart, founder member of Burnlaw Community Centre, Northumberland