Instapundit Reynolds links to a Popular Science article, most of which is behind a paywall. The article asks the question, "Why does Americans' poop rot in landfills when it could be fertilizing farms and parks?"
Posing that question exposes the ignorance of whoever wrote it. Some years ago Erma Bombeck wrote, "The Grass is Greenest Over the Septic Tank."
Actually, fertilizer made from human waste has been commercially available in the U.S. for nearly a century. In the mid-1900s my parents would buy it and use it on our lawn. It sold then and now under the brand name Milorganite which is described as "a portmanteau of the term Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen" as it was and is made from Milwaukee sewage.
There is literally no reason why human excreta cannot be used as fertilizer, places like Japan have done so more or less forever. The folks in Milwaukee pasturize it to kill pathogens, which is certainly a desirable refinement of the old "night soil" system.
My uncle ran a commercial turkey farm during and immediately after World War II. He would dispose of turkey manure by spreading it untreated on our adjacent commercial orange orchard. Those were some happy orange trees and the juice oranges we grew went to Sunkist. It was a win-win-win proposition.
Rural houses in regions with heavy clay soils find percolation-based septic systems don't work. One replacement is a system that treats household sewage with swimming pool chlorine to kill bacteria, after which an automatic system pulverizes, liquifies, and sprays it on lawns. That sounds way worse than it is.
