After the Flush

Looking beyond current sanitation models in the US to develop new ways of managing human waste as a resource.

What happens when you flush the toilet? Where does the waste go?

In this engagingly written ethnographic study, Nick Kawa follows the trail of human bodily excrement as it travels through multiple sites in the American Midwest. In addition to documenting the treatment and transformation of sanitation waste, this book chronicles the growing movement to promote sewage sludge, or biosolids, for fertilizing industrial farm fields, urban gardens, city parks, and ecological restoration sitesa complex endeavor that has fueled debates about potential harms to human and environmental health.

After the Flush presents the modern sanitation system through the eyes of insider experts, sharing insights from wastewater treatment operators and environmental scientists but also activists who advocate for alternative models to the industrial system. These include low-cost forms of ecological sanitation, illustrated through the author's own experiments with a compost toilet. Reframing human bodily waste as simply part of the human biome, this book offers radical possibilities for managing the human relationship to self, body, community, and ecology.

Nick Kawa is Associate Professor of Anthropology at The Ohio State University. He is author of Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests.

Contents

Part One. The System
1. Flush and Forget: The Emergence of the Modern Sanitation System
2. Bacteria Farming: The Hidden Workers and Lives Behind Wastewater's Transformation

Part Two. The Problems
3. The Smells: Or, How a Manure Lagoon and Its Unwieldy Excesses Overwhelmed a Rural Community in Northern Ohio
4. The Stigmas and Taboos: Or, The Problems of Social Exclusion and the Ironic Integration of Biosolids into Privileged Landscapes of Chicago
5. The Pollutants: Or, Why All the Shit That Gets into the Shit Makes Biosolids a Challenge to Manage

Part Three. The Alternatives
6. Making Humanure at Home
7. Container-Based Sanitation: An Alternative System for Times of Crisis
8. Working Toward Defecatory Justice (with Sarah Nahar)

Conclusion: The End Is Only the Beginning

Acknowledgments
Appendix: Methods and Tactics
Notes
Bibliography
Index