We’ve got seven billion people on this planet, and a whole lot more coming. While we worry about where all those people are going to live, and what they’re going to eat and drink, it’s not often that we think about where they’re going to poop.Last year when I spoke to Jack Sim, head of the World Toilet Organization, he explained the two major issues that we’re already facing with sanitation. First is the simple lack of access that billions of people still don’t have. And for those that do, out current sanitation system wastes an enormous amount of water and, as Sim noted, also wastes a huge amount of important nutrients, like phosphorous, that gets washed away with our brown gold.The poop industry is ripe for disruption, and a French company is offering one solution: Use turd-eating worms to compost waste right at the source.The company, Ecosphere Technologies, has developed an outhouse that, rather than relying on chemicals like a port-a-john, relies on about a pound of red wiggler worms that are native to Europe. A new installation in Quebec uses imported worms, placed inside of a mixture of dung and straw underneath to toilet, to devour feces delivered to them by a conveyor belt system. (When someone uses the toilet, pee filters through sand to wash away, while a pedal allows the user to transport their poo to the worm space.)“A worm eats almost its own weight in food each day,” worm farmer Helene Beaumont told the AFP during a demo at a golf course “And the more poop there is to eat, the more they reproduce.”The whole system uses no water or electricity, and a series of passive vents allegedly keeps the toilet smelling great. The company claims it can be used 10,000 times without servicing, which is far better than what a port-a-potty can boast, although with a current price tag of $40k for the worm system, port-a-potties are still a lot cheaper. While it’s of course rather unrealistic to assume that people are going to be keeping poop worms in their house, for the 40 percent of the human population that doesn’t have consistent access to sanitation, and for the millions of semi-permanent, very stinky portable toilets out there (looking at you Prospect Park), poop composting worms might be the perfect solution to an unpleasant problem.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.
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