Thank you very much. It's all about clickbait. So, welcome to the shit show.
I'm showing you my shit today.
This is a little small DIY science project, which I did in the past one, two years.
And before I start, if you are a researcher in
Hamburg, next month opens the call for transfer.
This is a little funding for researchers in Hamburg.
If you have an innovative idea, you can apply and you get 35000 € I guess.
And this was the money that made this research project possible.
So, I talk about shit for future, turning human shit into a climate solution.
The reason for this is that while I was doing my PhD, I went to
Antarctica for research, and seeing this biggest ice sheet in the
world melting like hell scared the shit out of me and broke my heart.
And so, I decided to become a climate hacker and to remove carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere because this is what I know best.
And when you hear carbon dioxide removal or negative emissions,
you immediately think of carbon direct air capture, which
is a continuation of the linear economy that we have.
So, we have a resource, a product, and we dump the waste and never use it again.
What I present you is hot shit because it's circular and it is
respecting what the earth system did for more than four billion years.
It's just cycling everything and, yeah, everything is connecting to everything.
Mitigating the climate crisis requires negative emissions.
This is absolutely uncomfortable, and this is the
consequence of ignoring climate scientists for over 70 years.
So, I explain to you what this means.
When we talk about net zero, the concept often is, we have the emissions
of the past, the gray area, then we have the brown area, so in future
we will still emit emissions, but we have turned into good humans
overnight and we reduce our emissions emissions to the bare minimum.
And towards the end of the century, we have residual emissions,
that means the emissions we cannot avoid, like from agriculture.
And to reach net zero, to follow the black line, the residual
emissions have to be counterbalanced by negative emissions.
The less we fuck up our earth system, the more the earth system
helps us to have these negative emissions because, it's mostly
a natural process happening, as I said, since billions of years.
But this is the highway to hell.
Because the brown emissions, sort of our future emissions, will add to our global warming.
And by the end of the century, we will not be able to stay below 1.5 degree C,
and it was extremely unlikely that we stay below 2 degrees C of global warming.
And that's absolutely unacceptable.
What we have to do instead is to create more negative emissions than
residual emissions, to counterbalance what we emit in future, and then
afterwards to also counterbalance what we have emitted in the past.
Because this is the way to bring down the temperature again, and to prevent
global tipping elements to being destroyed, and to unfuck our future.
So, the IPCC says we need about 6 to 10 gigatons of net
negative emissions by 2050, to stay below 1.5 degree.
Yeah, that's very ambitious.
And that only works if we at the same time reduce 90% of our emissions.
So, if no emission reduction happens, my work doesn't make a difference at all.
And so, I'm working on this since a few years, and these
6 to 10 gigatons of negative emissions, for me it sounds
like utopia, so I don't think that we will reach this.
That means we have to even work harder on the emissions reductions.
Because, yeah, negative emissions are not solving the climate
crisis, they just help us to reach net zero faster and help us to
clean up the shit from what we emit in the future and the past.
Since billions of years, the Earth system is storing CO2 in two ways.
The one is inorganic carbon. This is done by rock weathering and mineralization.
This is my main research.
So, carbon is stored in the water, and later it becomes a rock, a limestone.
For example, the Alps is a huge storage of carbon.
And the other one you're familiar with much more, I guess,
is the organic carbon, and that happens via photosynthesis.
I don't explain you what methods we can use to remove carbon dioxide.
I have done this two years ago, so I focus on biochar.
For biochar, the carbon dioxide removal is done via photosynthesis,
super comfortable because we don't have to do anything.
The problem is that our biomass has a very high risk of
reversal, especially when you live in climate crisis.
So, the carbon dioxide might not be stored a very long time.
And one solution is to stabilize the organic carbon.
So, this can be done by pyrolysis, and there are two ways to pyrolyse your biomass.
The first one you see is the modern high-tech part.
So, you take biomass and, of course, you always take waste biomass.
Otherwise, it's not sustainable, so you don't cut down trees to make your biochar.
You always take biomass that has no other use.
And then it's very important that you have a limited oxygen supply.
You heat your biomass between 300 to 800 degrees.
In such plants, they often go over 600 and more.
And then the biomass will release gases.
And the first gases that start burning are hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane.
So, this syngas is then producing energy.
The energy can be put back into the system and run the pyrolysis oven.
And at the end, please keep this in mind, you gain more
energy out of this process than you have put in to start it.
That's super important.
Everybody's asking, how much energy do you need to make biochar?
No, it's an energy production. You produce excess energy.
It's part of the energy transition as well.
If you ask this question later, I will scream and run out of this room. Yeah.
And one of the side products is biochar.
So, if you produce energy by burning wood, you nearly release 100 percent of the carbon.
If you do pyrolysis, you store about 30 percent
of the carbon in the solid material, the biochar.
So, you have prevented 30 percent to go to the air.
So, the biochar can be used in many different occasions. Just Google it, please.
I talk about biochar as a soil additive today.
And the other method to do pyrolysis is the traditional one.
So, you can just start burning wood chips.
And at a certain level, you stop the fire and prevent that it is decomposed to ash.
I can also show you later in the bonus material how to do this.
And you lose a lot of energy, sure, but you also don't need energy to start it.
Just a match.
And you can modify such reactors for cooking or also capture the
heat and use the heat for the drying process of anything else.
So, even here, you can get a little bit more out of it than
just burning some of your waste biomass from your garden.
So, biochar is fantastic. You see the pores under the microscope image.
And this makes biochar acting like a sponge. So, it's super porous.
It can take up water and nutrients. And you can then put it in the soil.
And these are tropical soils from Brazil.
And you can see on the right side an engineered soil.
That means the people have taken biochar. They peed on it.
They maybe soaked in manure or they put compost on it.
And they have engineered these poor tropical soils into a fertile soil
to use it for their agriculture and the base of their food system.
So, biochar is acting like a sponge. That means it can also hold water.
And during dry seasons, the plants on the field survive
much longer than the plants on the soil without biochar.
So, let's turn to shit. Shit is like gold.
Because all the nutrients that are in the plants and that we
eat and that we need for our daily life, we also shit out.
And I have one favorite nutrient. That's phosphorus. I really love it.
And we shit about 1600 million tons a year, we all together.
And if you extract the available phosphorus from this pool, you could cover
about 11 percent of our global demand of phosphorus fertilizer for agriculture.
And the same amount you also get out of pee.
And I learned from a study that depending on what you
eat, the more phosphorus goes into your poo or your pee.
So, if you eat a lot of fiber, your poo has more phosphorus than your pee.
So, if the phosphorus fertilizer disappear overnight,
the global food production drops by 30 to 50 %.
Because phosphorus is essential for the root
development of plants, the reproductive process.
think back on to biology in school, when you learn about photosynthesis,
you had the adenosine triphosphate and the adenosine diphosphate, the
ATP and ADP, which do the energy transfer within the photosynthesis.
And for this, you need phosphorus. So, no phosphorus, no photosynthesis.
And the big problem is the price of phosphorus fertilizer.
So, this is aggregated data from phosphate rock and diammonium phosphate.
And the problem is most phosphate comes from geological resources.
That means they need millions of years to be regenerated.
This is not a time spent we can survive. It has a minor impact.
The way it's used today is often leading to eutrophication.
That means a lot of phosphorus is lost and washed
to rivers and oceans where you have algae blooms.
The geographical distribution is very problematic because it's not distributed equally.
The biggest phosphate rock resources are in Morocco.
But other important global players are also China and Russia.
And the global market is extremely volatile, as you can see.
So, the last peak is the attack on Ukraine.
And within the next 25 years, our demand in phosphorus will double.
So, we really need to recycle that.
And recycling phosphorus from shit is already
done, and it will be more and more required by law.
And there are, again, two ways to do this.
The modern high-tech part is to burn the shit. This is done here in Hamburg.
And then you have an ash, which is full of all the different nutrients and also metals.
And with high technology, you can leach them out.
You can separate them from each other. That's super.
But you also emit all the carbon that was stored in the shit.
The other thing is small-scale composting of your own shit, which
can be challenging, because you have the risk of the pathogens.
And also, more and more problematic are the pharmaceuticals, because they might resist.
And of course, you have CO2 emissions, because composting means little microbes
eat your shit and they exhale CO2. So, most of the carbon dioxide is also lost.
Maintaining pasteurization or thermophilic composting is required
to at least combat the pathogens with the pharmaceuticals.
It can be more difficult.
While I was searching more information, like how
efficient is composting, I found an example from
Kampala in Uganda, from a wastewater treatment facility who treats the pool
of 1.5 million people every day, and they found that composting is very good,
but it requires a lot of expertise, infrastructure, and it costs too much money.
So the pyrolysis destroys pharmaceuticals and
pathogens, and at the same time generates energy,
which could bring down the costs. And there's a reason
why pyrolyzing shit is not so popular right now,
because if you do it, most of the nutrients are
bound in the biochar, and they cannot be leached out
so easily. And this study was done in 2020, and they did a phosphorus extraction with water,
and from the pure shit, in one round they could
extract 1.2% of the phosphorus, and when they pyrolyzed
at 700 degrees, they got 0.04% out of it, which
is a disaster. The scientists did the so-called
K-doping, so K stands for potassium, they added
potassium acetate, which triggered the formation
of water-soluble potassium phosphates during 700 degrees of pyrolysis, and this happened.
And this is some fantastic sexy shit. So, yeah,
you get four times more out than not pyrolyzing the
shit at all. And I wanted to do sexy shit, and I
started the Superchar project. I wanted to call it
shitchar, but you don't get funding if you call it
shitchar. So, I had a very ambitious goal. Of course,
I want to save the world, and I want to be sustainable as fuck. I wanted to have a recycling
process based on low-cost, high-abundant resources,
so you're shit. I want to prevent environmental
contamination and secure global health, because
40% of the global population don't have proper
sanitation, a life-threatening health disaster. With the biochar, you can increase
soil fertility and soil resilience, and increase
also the global food security. Of course, you get
independent from fertilizers. And at the same time,
this should be easy to understand and low-tech,
because the most problems through shit are occurring
in low-technology countries. And of course,
it should be open knowledge, and as I'm a carbon
capture, it should remove carbon dioxide via biochar.
So, I have the shit, which is full of phosphorus,
and I need something as a potassium source. And I
don't want to mine it, to not depend on the mining.
And I was thinking, okay, so some organic source of
potassium? And I googled and I googled, and I found
this. So, chicken poo contains between one to three
percent of pure potassium. So, the plan was to mix chicken poo, pelletize it, pyrolyse it,
trigger the formation of potassium phosphates,
and call it superchar, and make a big video to
educate all the world, feed all the people. Thanks. Okay. We had a heat wave in August 2024,
and I used that heat to dry shit in the backyard of my parents.
It's a job that makes you very lonely.
Yeah. You see, my car full of shit. This was only half of the load I got.
So, the black things in the background, this is human shit, and the brown is chicken shit.
I could employ my father to take care. And then I mixed 30 percent chicken shit with
70 percent human shit, pelletized it, pyrolyzed it,
and I did this phosphate or phosphorus extraction,
as the people have done in the study I showed you
previously. So, just again, they got out up to 9
percent of the phosphorus through their extraction
method. And these are my results. Thank you.
Yeah. Fuck. So, the chicken poo I added only could deliver 0.2 percent to the biomass,
and not 5 percent as they had in their study, of
course. And then the formation of water-soluble
potassium phosphates likely didn't happen. But I also wanted to store carbon dioxide. So,
you see that wood biochar can store about three tons of carbon dioxide per ton of biochar.
Sounds strange.
Yeah. One kilogram of pure carbon accounts for 3
.6 kilogram of CO2. So, with one ton of biochar,
you store three tons of CO2. That's the secret.
And I did a test. So, if I put it in the soil
and wait a thousand years, about 90 percent of
the carbon will still be there. So, wow, cool.
You can nearly call it permanent. That's my results.
So, no, you don't store so much carbon dioxide
as you want to. And the permanence is also shit.
So, three-quarter of the carbon dioxide will be
released within a thousand years. On the other side,
that means all the nutrients which are captured
in this biochar will be released in that time. A thousand years. Okay. So, that was not it.
I did something else. So, the longest studies on
what happens if I put it in the soil are eight weeks,
I learned. So, I did a long -term experiment over one
year. And this works that you take a plastic tube,
you put a net on the bottom and then fill it with
sand. And this is a rainmaker. You can look at it
later. I put rain on it on a regular base, three
times a week. And then I analyzed the nutrients
in the water to know, okay, if I put it in the
ground and it rains, what can the plants expect
in terms of nutrients? And I found something which is absolutely normal. Yay. So, it's
absolutely normal that biochars lose a lot of the
potassium, the calcium and magnesium within the
first few weeks when they experience rain. That's
absolutely normal. But what is different is that
the concentration of phosphorus and also silica is
rising over time. So, the longer the biochar is in
the soil, the more nutrient it releases to the plants.
And this is what I call a slow-release fertilizer.
The amounts are very small, but I found it out and nobody else found it out before.
Yeah, and if I now find a way to push, like, how
can I release more phosphorus from this superchar,
or the shitschar, then maybe I have enough phosphorus
for the plants to make a difference. And I know that
it will release over a long time and not just at
the beginning. And there's a reason that pyrolyzed
shit is worth much more. So, let's jump to Guatemala.
This is Lago Atitlán in Guatemala, a very
special place, because this lake doesn't have any
drainage. All pollutants that go into the lake stay in
the lake. It is a very important source for fresh water.
And more than 80% of the people in Guatemala don't
have proper sanitation. All their shit goes in the
environment. This is a tourist area, so they have
toilets. I checked. I checked it. But most of the
toilet or, yeah, most of the sewage water is directly
going to the lake, and even if people don't have toilets,
they have pits in the hole, and if the pit is full, then
they move a few meters and open a new pit, and so on.
So, you cannot take a bath in the lake, and you cannot drink the tap water, and so on.
So, that's a big issue, and these things happen around the world.
I'm so happy that this was a connection that I
didn't expect to happen, so I met people from MoSan.
MoSan stands for mobile sanitation, and this is an
NGO which is supported by the non-profit Goldeimer.
Goldeimer is running toilets on festivals, like the hurricane
festival, and they take their profit to build toilets around the world.
And MoSan, their mission is to increase health, to reduce the
disease spreading by shit, to protect the water resources there,
and to use the biochar then as a fertilizer and to create jobs.
And you see, they have built a public toilet here, this is close to the lake,
but they also distribute dry toilets to private households, and they collect
the shit, and they were so overwhelmed by the amount of shit that they could not
start composting, but they decided to pyrolyse it and make biochar out of it.
And thanks to my funding, I was able to go there and try out,
is it possible to make superchar in a real-world environment?
You can see me shoveling much, much more shit.
I think I'm a shit master or administrator of shit.
So this is a mixture out of human shit. It comes from a waste water treatment.
And I mix it with chicken poo, and I put some water on it that it sticks together, dry it.
Then it's...
They start the burning process with some cocoa fiber, and
then magic happens, and this is then the biochar you get.
Yeah, you can touch it with your hands.
So I spent some weeks there, and I produced some of the superchar.
This was in summer this year, and the very disappointing results I
showed you before, I had four weeks ago, after submitting the talk here.
So I expected to show you the next best solution for
the world, but then comes science and my analysis.
So, I observed something very important, and I think it's important that you know this too.
On the right side, you see a very typical tropical soil.
Most of the soil is highly weathered bedrock.
That means the high rain, or the high amount of rain, and
the high temperatures lead to a dissolution of bedrock.
All the nutrients are washed out, and if you get it
in your hand, it's super brittle, it just falls apart.
And this is often a reason why you have landslides
in these regions when you have heavy rain events.
On top is a very thin organic layer, and that's the base
of the food production for half of the world's population.
So, this is where the food grows.
And it's super vulnerable to erosion, and especially if you have these landslides.
And if it's eroded, it ends up in the lake again.
And on the other side, this is a coffee plantation, an organic coffee plantation.
I was surprised to see so much trash there, but that's the way it is there.
And these guys work for MoSan.
They have planted some coffee plants within the
biochar, and now they are checking how they are doing.
And you can see this is a very steep slope, and it seems that the
trash is holding together this little bit of soil, which is there.
But during the rainy season, a lot of it is washed away.
And biochar delivers so many co-benefits to the soil.
Also a protection against erosion, because it
promotes plants to build a lot more roots than usual.
And it also holds water that in the dry season, the soil
is not dried out, and it rains, and then it's washed away.
So, it can sustain, it can equal out the wet and dry cycle.
So, producing biochar from something which is a big problem, and then using it to
secure the organic layer, the base of the food, is an amazing project, I think.
And I'm very happy that I could go there and learn from them.
I learned much more than they learned from me.
And that's so important why scientists need to go out in the field. So, what?
I wasted a lot of money, you can say, and found out
that superchar is not a high-performing fertilizer.
The power of chicken poo is overestimated, and CO2 removal
was only done on the short term, not on the long term.
But superchar is also a slow-release fertilizer. There is a potential in it.
I wish I had more time and resources to go deeper into research.
Maybe this comes one day.
And still, all other co-benefits of biochar still work in the soil.
So, whether you have these super fertilizing skills, yes or not, all the other
things from biochar which they can provide to the soil are still working.
So, what I did was more beneficial for the shit management, the soil
improvement, and gaining some energy than storing CO2 or recycling phosphorus.
But that's science. And with this, I'd like to say warm greetings from Guatemala.
Thank you for enjoying my shit with me.
And if you'd like to donate, you can do this.
You are guided to the home page of GoldEimer.
And GoldEimer is then distributing the money to MoSan.
I have moving pictures here. So, yes. That was it.
I have some bonus material, how to do your own biochar. I have some shit.
It's really shit. And I have some pyrolyzed shit. And, yeah.
And I have also some things, magic things here. And, yeah.
I'm happy to answer your questions.
Herald: Thank you really much for your talk, Elena.
There was already a really quick person standing on mic number
one, so we don't waste time and start with the first question.
Question: First of all, thank you very much for that.
That was highly interesting, even if the results
were not what you kind of wanted to present.
I'm really curious, the experiment you did in your parents' backyard,
that shit looked a lot darker and drier than I would have expected.
What sort of, like, pre-prep of the material did you do to kind of get to that stage?
Elena: So, it was local shit.
It comes from a wastewater treatment, not in Hamburg, but close to Hamburg.
And they separate the liquid from the solid. They produce biogas from the solids.
And after this biomass is exhausted, they normally
bring it to the city of Hamburg where it is burned.
And this was the biomass I got. So, it was not so stinky.
And as soon as it's dried, you can test it. It doesn't stink so much anymore.
So, just saying, like, you're allowed to sniff, but don't touch.
Herald: Maybe in addition to this, there will be a small table when you leave after the talk.
And you can find Elena with her shit show.
And you can smell, taste, take it in your hands. You will find her there.
Elena: And as you were the first and fastest with the question, you got a little of paralyzed shit.
We have a question from the internet. Signal Angel, please.
Yes, hello. The internet is also very concerned with the pre-preparation steps.
Not only concerning, for example, a mixture of like waste and plastics, but also
very stable in mix, like heavy metals or some PFAS that might resist pyrolysis.
Can you elaborate on this, like the preparation process a bit more?
Yeah. So, I talked with a biochar engineer about this.
And he said, if you put shit in, you get shit out.
Biochar from wood, for example, has a very good quality.
You can use it for also, like, if you're sick and you need some activated charcoal,
then you can, if you don't have anything else, you can eat the wood biochar.
But I wouldn't do this with shit char.
So, the shit I got from Germany was contaminated, especially with, I don't remember.
I don't remember.
But there are some heavy metals inside because the water
from all the water management goes into the waste treatment.
And in Guatemala, I think we had quite high amounts of arsenic,
which is due to the volcanic origin of the region there.
So, arsenic is quite high in the rocks and the soil there.
Therefore, I would use biochar not for, yeah, any
medicine-related things, because you can also do this.
And this is still an issue that needs to be addressed.
Talking about polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
So, above 700 degrees, you burn almost or literally all of them.
So, it's important to maintain a very high temperature, which was maintained in Guatemala.
You can measure it. And also, when I do it myself,
Then I also reach temperatures of above 700 degrees.
And so, what's very, very important, I can to show you here is that you maintain
a carpet of fire during pyrolysis, because all the gases that go up need to be
oxidized to prevent methane to escape, but also to prevent an incomplete combustion.
And if you completely combust the carbon, then you prevent
the formation of polycyclic aromatic carbons, hydrocarbons.
Herald: Then, microphone number three, please.
Question: Yes, thank you for the great talk.
I'm currently, I was happy to see Goldheimer mentioned,
as I'm already composting my own shit in my garden.
But I have a question. So, the pyrolysis, is it worth doing it at home?
So, would it be worth it to like burn off most of my weeds
, or would it be better to do it in a bigger scale?
It's always worth it.
So, if you have biomass that you have no other use for, you can pyrolyse it like this.
And on the slide, if you want to attend a workshop and learn it, go to
Kohlebunt.de or just go to YouTube and you find a thousand tutorials.
Because you can always burn it, but then you release like 100% of the carbon.
If you pyrolyse it, you keep some of the carbon in the
solid and you can at least store a little bit of carbon.
And then you can use it as a solid improvement.
I would pyrolyse all the the wood remains.
And the shit, I mean, you should always already say you do composting.
So, it's perfect to make biochar from your wood, to mix
it with a composted shit and then use it for your soil.
That sounds promising. If you see large trees, it's his garden.
Herald: Microphone number two, please.
Yeah, hi. Thanks for the talk. It was really interesting.
I would be interested in, is there still some leverage in
your process to increase the phosphate, basically parts?
Or are you not expecting any bigger things by, I don't know, improving
the process or maybe the chicken manure or something like that?
So, the chicken manure was also the highest potassium shit I could find.
On Christmas, I made some other biochar and I took potassium
phosphate, which is then again having the mining impact.
So, at the moment I'm a little bit stuck and I don't know how to proceed.
If you have any ideas, contact me.
Yeah, at the moment I don't know how to proceed.
Herald: Another question from the internet.
Internet: Yes, regarding the paralysis and the energy one there,
can you give more details on how much energy is gained?
Elena: No, because it depends on the technology you
use and how well all the processes are balanced.
You can produce or you can manage your pyrolysis that you have also the
formation of some oil or you just have the formation of gas and solids.
And it really depends on the process and how
it's engineered in every single pyrolysis plant.
And of course, to gain excess energy, you really have to close all the value
change in your process, which you only do with a high-tech pyrolysis oven.
Herald: So, time is running out.
So, let's try to ask our questions really quick and efficient.
Number three, please. How did you get to the 70-30 ratio?
Because that seems very specific.
Elena: I just did it.
Question: So, no molecular mass calculation about the potassium?
No. So, my thought was that human shit is a bigger issue than chicken shit.
And so, I wanted to have more human shit than chicken shit, but I also wanted
to add enough potassium and then I found like, okay, 30% is maybe right.
I also have some other mixtures like 5, 10, 20% and so on.
But, yeah, the results were also not consistent.
Herald: Microphone number one.
Question: Thank you.
Do you know any studies about quality of shit in
terms of amount of phosphorus depending on diet?
Elena: Yes, that's what I said.
So, if you eat a lot of fiber, which is undigested, more
phosphorus ends in the solid part and not in the pea.
But if you eat less fiber, more phosphorus goes to the pea.
I mean, next question and I get the study for you.
Herald: Signal Angel, question from the rep.
Internet: How did you conduct the analysis?
Did you send it to a lab or do you have your own stuff at home for analysis?
Elena: I work at the university and I have a lab there.
Microphone number three. Last question, mic number three.
Question: Yeah, thanks for your work and keep it up.
I'm just curious why you want to pyrolyze the shit and not just add,
sorry, don't add the shit to the pyrolyzed wood chips, to the charcoal.
Because that was my understanding of how Terra Preta and all this works, where
you have the charcoal and then you add nutrients into this matrix of char.
Elena: Yeah.
So, as I said, you can be overwhelmed by the amount of shit if you want to compost it.
And you have the issue with the pharmaceuticals.
So, it's not clear if you can really eliminate them.
And pyrolyzing them, if you do it with a modern
plant, you can generate extra energy out of it.
So, you can lower the costs.
And for Quetion 6: it's the study, Mihelc ic et al, 2018. Thank you very much.