Surprising Uses For Poop

Head over to the islands off the Pacific coast of Peru and you'll see mountains of plop hundreds of feet high, which are poop that’s been building up for centuries. And, surprisingly, people are rushing to get their hands on it! It turns out the brown stuff has all sorts of strange benefits. Hold your breath as we find out exactly what’s going on with all that Peruvian poop, and take a dive into some astonishing uses for it!

Guano Mining

Before we get into the sticky details, you’ve got to know one thing. Prior to the conflict in Ukraine kicking off, Russia and Ukraine together exported a sizeable 28% of the globe’s total fertilizer. Since they’re both a bit tied up at the moment, that means less fertilizer, and in turn less crops. But one country not panicking is Peru. That’s because it holds one of the world’s most prized exports: bird poop!

On the country’s islands live seabirds like the cormorant, the pelican, and the booby. Around 4 million birds cover every available part of the islands, where they build their nests. These animals feast on the delicious salty anchovies in the seas, then poop them all out in, as the Independent calls it, a dirty, potent, fishy cocktail. Other gooey bits like broken eggshells and the rotting bodies of long-gone birds also go into the mix and the end result is a rancid substance we call guano! Rancid, but very useful.

It’s chock full of nitrogen which boosts leafy growth in plants, phosphorus that helps root development, and potassium that keeps the whole plant healthy. But birds are everywhere, so what’s so special about the poop in Peru? It’s all about the unique climate; rainfall is scarce so all the nitrates in the stuff don’t evaporate or wash away, leaving it to dry in the hot sun.

And with the sheer number of birds that inhabit the islands, great hills of guano are dotted everywhere. There’s so much of it that some piles have been recorded to be 200 feet deep, that’s taller than Nelson’s column in London! With all this muck about, Peru has become the world’s top producer of guano with its value estimated at $1.1 billion annually. Though, even with this hefty price tag, most of the guano is kept domestically for Peru’s one million organic farmers.

This isn’t some new-fangled fad either. Guano’s use in agriculture dates all the way back to the indigenous pre-Hispanic people. Why, the very word "guano" comes from the Quechua language of the Incas, who called it “huanu”, meaning "dung." The oldest description of its use comes from 1604, though it was certainly used long before.

Chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega described a myriad of birds who dominated Peru’s islands. Their manure was so valued that the Incan kings forbade anyone from disturbing the birds, at threat of execution! This strict approach meant the Inca effectively maintained their guano supply, used it as fertilizer, and fed their empire for centuries.

Yet, when Europeans arrived, starting with Spain in the 16th century, they were so busy trying to find gold and silver that they completely ignored guano. So, its trade went on amongst indigenous people right under the Spanish’s noses. It wasn’t until hundreds of years later that the first European noticed its value, the Prussian explorer Alexander Von Humboldt.

In 1804, he was wandering around Peru’s docks, but he couldn’t stop sneezing. Turns out, the culprit was a bunch of barrels filled with ammonia-rich manure. Curious, he asked about them and, on realizing the guano’s potential, took a sample back to Europe and handed it to chemists for testing.

Let’s jump ahead to 1821, when Peru declared independence from Spain. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much for the country to celebrate. Peru was in chaos: people were divided, there was almost no infrastructure, and politics were as stable as a bowl of jelly! On top of that, the country was now in debt to British banks that had helped fund the revolution.

All seemed lost until 1840, when German chemist Justus Von Liebig confirmed that Peruvian guano was a fantastic fertilizer! What’s more, that year the world’s largest pile of guano at the time, more than 150 feet high, was found on the Chincha islands on the southern pacific coast!

Meanwhile, farmers all the way over in Europe and the US were trying to find new ways to feed their ever-growing population. Word spread of the miracle muck from Peru, and soon British businesses flocked to the islands of Chincha and Ballestas, hoping to get stinking rich, literally! Shipping guano wasn’t easy though. It reeked, rotted the timbers of ships, corroded unpainted iron and steel, and had a knack for overheating and catching fire. But nobody was put off!

The rest of Europe followed soon, and then the U.S., who even passed the Guano Island Act in 1856, which allowed Americans to claim guano from over 100 uninhabited islands in the Pacific and Atlantic. By the 1860s, Chilean companies joined the hunt too and spread their mining operations to the Bolivian coast! The Boom lasted from 1840 to 1870 and saw the extraction of 12 million tons of guano, all together valued at a mind blowing $500 million!

With all that dough, or dung, Peru could start paying off its debt and entrepreneurs and immigrants flocked to the capital Lima, turning it into a bustling cosmopolitan city. But there was one big problem with the guano boom, most Peruvians never saw any of its benefits. Sure, railways and other public projects were built and modernized, but it wasn’t enough to keep the economy growing at a decent pace. Most of the money stayed in the hands of the wealthy elite in Lima, while regions like the Sierra and Amazon were left poor and cut off from progress.

If that weren’t bad enough, as demand rose workers from China were brought in to harvest guano, where they faced slave-like conditions, discrimination, and had to earn enough for their transport and lodgings before even making a profit!

The way guano was harvested was also an environmental disaster. Miners swarmed the islands, completely ignoring breeding seasons, destroying habitats, and even slaughtering birds to get access to the stuff. And despite the guano yield growing year by year, reckless harvesting led to degradation of the islands' precious supply.

This wasn’t the only horror the hunt for guano brought. Seeing Bolivia’s crap covered coast, Chile wanted a piece of the smelly pie, and they weren’t taking no for an answer. On February 14th 1879, Chilean forces invaded the Bolivian port of Antofagasta. Things escalated further on April 5th, when Chile officially declared war on the allied forces of Bolivia and Peru, leading to the War of the Pacific. While there were lots of factors at play, what it came down to was three countries fighting over massive piles of poo.

The brutal war played out for 5 years, and at its end Chile emerged the clear winners. Bolivia lost access to its coast, becoming the landlocked country it remains to this day. Peru meanwhile ended up exactly as it had been before its independence, in debt. And by the 1880s, years of unchecked harvesting had stripped its islands bare, leaving nothing for the country to rebuild its broken economy on.

It all sounds pretty bleak for Peru right now. But all this chaos prompted one bright spark in the Peruvian government to say: hey, what if we didn’t destroy our natural resources? So, at the turn of the twentieth century, laws were passed that protected seabirds and put limits on how much guano could be harvested, so stocks could recover.

It was kind of like how the Incans did it three centuries before. Just with less executions. Fishing near the islands’ shores was also prohibited so that the seabirds always had plenty of anchovies to fill their bellies. Thanks to these combined efforts, the dwindling bird populations grew from a few hundred thousand in 1909 to over 30 million by 1957!

Despite all this hard work though, a recurring natural disaster called an El Nino hit the islands, where the surface layer of water becomes much warmer than usual, causing fish to swim deeper into the cold. Unable to plummet deep enough to catch them, many birds sadly starved. This alongside the rise of industrial fertilizers made the global guano trade decline, and by 1971 income from the once sought after sludge had plummeted to just one-twentieth of the record earnings from the previous century.

Even so, mining continued, and in 1997, Peru kicked off a project called “Proabonos.” This initiative aimed to protect seabirds, preserve marine biodiversity, encouraged eco-friendly mining, and subsidized guano prices for small farmers and indigenous communities. By 2010, Peru was still the world leader in guano production, and in 2022, they were raking up 33,000 to 44,000 tons of it a year!

Fast forward to Peru today, and the naval ship Pelicano still sails into the islands’ coasts to pick up its pongy cargo. Nobody lives on these islands, so each year, Peru’s Agriculture and Irrigation Ministry selects about 400 men to work as guano harvesters for eight months.

They still do it the old-fashioned way too, using tools and their hands. Machinery isn’t an option because the terrain is too rough and slippery, plus the noise would scare off the birds. So, every day for those eight months, the workers haul down up to 120 sacks each, each weighing 50lbs or more!

It’s truly backbreaking stuff, and due to Peru’s hot climate, the miners wake up at a grueling 4am and end their shifts at 12 noon to avoid the scorching heat. While the work is exhausting and dirty though, more than 60% of diggers return from one harvest to the next because of the bonuses the job brings, like free meals and health insurance. Plus, workers on the islands can earn over $750 a month, more than double Peru's minimum wage.

And they’re not getting paid for cruelty. How guano is mined is much more sustainable than it was in the 1800s. Islands are only chosen after an evaluation by biologists to guarantee that no birds are nesting, and the work is usually limited to just a couple of islands. Poachers are an issue though, known to shoot 200 animals or more in one night to sell the meat for a cheap price. Because of this, a guard stands watch at all times.

Farmers in Peru prefer using guano since a lot of them can’t afford chemical fertilizers. But even with all this guano being mined, it’s still not enough for Peru’s 2.4 million small and medium-scale farmers. About half of them still have to rely on imported fertilizers to keep their crops growing.

And even with all the environmental protections in place, half of all seabird species are under threat from human-caused problems: climate change, pollution, you name it. Guano harvesting seems like a solid, renewable source that keeps seabird populations in check, so let’s hope it sticks around.

Of course, guano isn’t the first poop to prove useful. Humans have been utilizing the stinky stuff since the dawn of time! Around 10,000 years ago, early farmers used animal dung to fuel their fires, and even shaped it into houses! At least they didn’t need to worry about keeping them clean!

As for fertilizer, the whole idea of using manure dates back to at least 7,000 years ago in Greece and central Europe. But it’s not just food and homes that people used droppings for. From the 9th century BC right up to the 4th century AD, Scythians, nomadic warriors of Central Asia, would dip their arrows in a deadly concoction of snake venom, blood and poo. Even if the arrow didn’t finish off their target right away, the poison and excrement caused nasty illnesses like gangrene and tetanus.

And if you thought humanity’s sadistic use of the brown stuff ended there, think again. In medieval wars, soldiers would fling bodies of bubonic plague victims, and their poop, over enemy castle walls to spread disease inside.

By the 1800s, European poop use had somewhat changed. Leather became increasingly popular in England and in order to soften the hide, tanners used, you guessed it, dog poop! The muck contains enzymes that break down and soften stiff leather. Because of this, people would wander the streets looking for dog doo, known as pure!

Bring things forward to the modern age and we’re still using poop in unconventional ways. In the 1990s, the western world even started drinking the stuff! The Indonesian drink Kopi Luwak is a coffee made from beans digested by civets, a small mammal species. However, interest in the drink led to a cruel industry where these animals are caged and force-fed the beans. That kind of crap is best left in the past.

Using more sustainable resources to power our modern conveniences though? That’s something that shouldn’t be left behind, and what’s more sustainable than poop? In one year, the human species squeezes out 320 million tons of it, the same weight as 350 golden gate bridges! With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at some other shocking and ingenious uses for our poop.

Rocket Fuel From Human Waste

Why are we only using poo on Earth when we could also use it to reach the stars? Those nerds at NASA thought the same thing in 2006, when the space agency was planning to build a base on the moon between 2019 and 2024.

Obviously, this grand plan never came to fruition, but they came up with some ex-crellent ideas nonetheless! Normally, astronauts’ poo is stored in containers that burn up when re-entering our planet’s atmosphere, but on longer term missions the sheer amount of detritus to bring back would be very impractical.

So, NASA turned to the University of Florida for help in finding a use for all those turds, say, to help fuel the rockets. Scientists Pratap Pullammanappallil and Abhishek Dhoble took on the smelly challenge. Turns out, the idea wasn’t as crappy as it sounds!

They tested how much methane could be produced from waste and how quickly, and eventually came up with an anaerobic digester process which breaks down the waste, kills harmful pathogens, and produces biogas, mainly methane and carbon dioxide. This process could generate over 76 gallons of methane per crew per day, all in a week, and fuel the spacecraft’s rockets, meaning the ship wouldn’t have to carry so much heavy traditional fuel.

Plus, the anaerobic process also produces about 200 gallons of water, though they definitely wouldn’t be drinking this stuff! Instead, it would be split into hydrogen and oxygen for the spaceship’s backup air. Who’d have thought?!

NASA wasn’t the only group of space nerds trying to turn poop into something useful though! The Inspiration Mars Foundation had ambitious plans to reach Mars by 2018, then 2021, and now, who knows? Their hypothetical mission faced some tricky problems, like shielding the crew from dangerous cosmic rays from the sun, which could boost their cancer risk by 3%.

Another problem is that in space, there’s, ironically, not much space! You need plenty of room for food and water, and when the crew do their doo-doos, that has to be stored on the ship too. So, Inspiration Mars decided to tie two loose ends at once by lining the spaceship’s walls with a protective 15-inch-thick barrier of food, water, and poop!

At the start of the mission, the ship would be packed with bags of food and water. As the 501-day mission went on, and the crew ate and drank their supplies, the empty bags would be filled with their poop instead. Researcher Taber MacCallum explained that after astronauts did their business, their waste would be bagged, dehydrated, and then used as a radiation shield. Even weirder, McCallum said that the water removed from the dehydrated waste could be recycled for drinking!

Call it crazy, but scientists at Cornell University have come up with a similar idea, even developing a spacesuit with an in-built filter, turning pee into water in just five minutes. Using water to protect against rays isn’t a completely mad idea either, since it’s rich in hydrogen, which blocks neutron radiation, and the same is true for pee. Though we can’t tell you how effective poo is, and who’d want to live in a spaceship with walls filled of dried-up poop anyway!

Fecal Transplant

When carried out by medical professionals, eating poo can be surprisingly good for us! And that's not a joke. We’ve got trillions of microorganisms living in our guts that defend against germs and break down food. But when we take antibiotics, these can wipe out helpful bacteria, allowing bad bacteria called Clostridium difficile, or C. diff, to take over.

C. diff causes not so fun things like fever, diarrhea, and it can even be fatal, over 15,000 Americans a year pass away from the illness. But for those lying sick in bed, don’t worry, there’s a whiffy solution! Doctors can perform a fecal transplant, where poop from a healthy donor is placed into a sick person’s digestive system.

Why would anyone want someone else’s crap inside them? For one thing, 30 to 50% of it is made of bacteria and other organisms living inside us. These microbes can help restore the ecosystem of a sick person’s guts and kick out C. difficile.

That doesn’t mean you should go chomping up any old doo-doo you see. Most of the time the procedure is done via colonoscopy, but it can also be swallowed in pill form, or ingested by a tube through the nose into the intestines. Gross it may seem, but it’s super effective, with reported success rates of 90 to 95%! And that’s just the beginning!

Believe it or not, everyone’s poop is unique and filled with different microorganisms that can even affect mood, mental health and neurological conditions, like Alzheimer’s and autism. Back in 2015, Massachusetts research facility, OpenBiome were bringing in samples from donors for poop transplants. But not any defecator could donate; they decided who made the cut using the Bristol stool chart. The perfect specimen is apparently type 3, described as “like a sausage but with cracks on its surface.” OpenBiome were even paying $40 per stool sample!

Heating Homes With Human Waste

For some people, their house is the only place they can do their business. But imagine what it’d be like if your business was powering your house! In 2010, Didcot, Oxfordshire in England, energy company Centrica opened a sparkling new biogas plant that would pump 200 homes with heat made from human waste.

Don’t worry, the town of Didcot hasn’t become especially smelly. The poop goes through anaerobic digestion that turns it into fuel and removes any bad odors. First the sewage sludge is collected in air-tight tanks, where it’s heated up. Microorganisms are added to the mix to break down the waste, producing a biogas rich in methane. This methane is then purified and burnt in a combustion turbine, converting energy stored in methane into electricity.

Right now, it’s not the most efficient, it takes the poo of 100,000 people to crank out 51kWh of electricity, enough to power 3,000 to 5,000 LED energy saving light bulbs. And from the flush of the toilet to the flash of the bulb, the process takes a fairly long 23 days. But it’s just the start. British energy companies hope to roll this across the whole of the UK since the process coughs out much less carbon dioxide than when burning fossil fuels.

In 2021, Thames Water came up with a plan to use extra heat from sewage to warm more than 2,000 new homes in Kingston Upon Thames, southwest London. Normally, the water from this process is treated and returned to rivers, but in this case, about a third of it will be sent to a new energy center in Hogsmill, fitting name, to heat water for Kingston’s housing estate. This could cut over 110,000 tons of carbon emissions in 30 years, the equivalent of over 150,000 return flights from London to New York!

It's not just human poo that’s powering things either. In 2010, chicken manure was used at a biogas power plant in Cirencester, burning the doo-doo in a generator to make heat and electricity. While new to the UK, biogas plants are common in the rest of Europe, especially Germany and Sweden. It could be that one day, 15% of the energy consumed in Britain is powered by sewage, old food thrown out by supermarkets, and organic waste produced by businesses like breweries.

In India, with energy prices shooting up, people have also looked to animals to make their fuel. There are around 308 million cows in the country, splatting out a massive 3.3 million tons of dung every year. At the moment, India has to buy in about half of its natural gas, though that’s cash that they’d much rather keep in their own wallets. So, the government’s jumped in and started investing in anaerobic digestion, turning gunk into gas.

To boost the biogas industry, they’ve even told gas suppliers that from 2025 they have to mix 1% biomethane into their natural gas. That’s methane created by “upgrading” biogas, which means taking out the CO2 and other bad bits, making it clean and useable. By 2028, this 1% should go up to 5%. Overall, the future’s looks bright.

I hope you were amazed at the surprising uses for poop! Thanks for reading.