Why does Americans' poop rot in landfills when it could be fertilizing farms and parks?
in the basement of 1550 Mission Street in San Francisco—a new high-rise in the city’s prime real estate location—listening to the steady hum of human grime being filtered. Above me, residents on 38 floors are showering and brushing their teeth as part of their morning routine. In front of me, a maze of pipes and tubes feeds their discarded water into a membrane bioreactor the size of a backyard hot tub.
That mindset began to change in 2011, first among tech creators and then the larger public, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation issued the, asking experts to recover valuable resources from toilet outputs, including clean water and nutrients. Originally intended to solve sanitation challenges in poorer countries, it propelled new ideas for sewage treatment in general. California’s historic drought was another big catalyst.
Growing up in 1960s Odessa, Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, Igor Tartakovsky aimed to be a rocket scientist. “I wanted to build planes and spaceships—that was my childhood dream,” he says. Yet for a Jewish kid, it was a difficult path. The anti-Semitism in the Soviet empire was palpable: Igor graduated from high school with highest honors, but was turned down from his town’s engineering schools.
In San Francisco, Igor met his future wife, got a job, and had children. Later he launched his own company, designing air-conditioning systems for apartment and office buildings in the city. He never thought he’d end up making “humanure.”Throughout most of human history, our relationship with our waste has been thorny. We can’t stop producing it, but we can’t live with it.
For Igor and Aaron, his third and youngest son, who studied political science but ended up following in his father’s engineering footsteps, the move was a serendipitous one. They’d just gotten their toes wet in sewage and were pumped to dive in. In 2013, a client asked Igor to find a building-wide sewage recycling system for their space in the Bay Area. He couldn’t find a single model on the market.
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