Excrete stragegy

Nicola & Pete plus daughters Lola, now 9 and Nell, now 7, spent last year exploring Britain in a carbon-light manner. Our spring 2008 challenge is to give up waste from 24 March to 24 April. Most posts are by Nicola (as it was her silly idea). This is how it’s going:

Anyone got any ideas what to usefully do with dog poo (seen here in the pic before it's been trodden on)? I’ve just learnt that before Thomas Crapper’s wasteful water closet invention the night soil of Islington would be sent down to Hertford to dress and fertilise the market gardens and farmland there.

More than 100 years have been wasted not dumping our dumps on the fields. Half of me thinks this is why it’s great to be living now, the other half is anxious about why have we think it is OK to flush away so many tones of poo?

Verdict: The best book on the subject is by an American, and is called Humanure. It makes even the worst ablution appear like a perfume of the gods (so long as it didn't come from a dog).