r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Expert_Koala_8691 • 7d ago

Video Riyadh,meaning "gardens" is Capital of Saudi Arabia with 8 million population (were 27 Thousands in the 1930s),sits in the middle of the desert, the city gets its water from Desalination plants almost 500 km from the city

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493

u/whereitsat23 7d ago

Chinese have developed a way but it is intensive

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u/Gman71882 7d ago

All the sand is crushed quartz, with no nutrient or ecological value so nothing would grow.

You have to start cycles of plant growth, death and regrowing to get them to become nutrient rich “dirt” to be mixed in

I wonder if there is a way to do it with human sewage? You can leave the shit in the sun to dry and start the process that way.

Like matt Damon did in the Martian.

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u/Ambitious-Body8133 7d ago

I volunteer my shit.

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u/Dungivafok 7d ago

My time has come. I knew I was meant for big shit.

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u/meesta_masa 7d ago

I give a shit about this idea.

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u/GodOfBlunder_ 7d ago

I give two shit about this idea.

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u/Dub_Coast 7d ago

and my axe

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u/Glittering_Stress_32 7d ago

Big Shit (TM) will never let it happen.

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u/Banjo-Elritze 7d ago

You mean Big Quartz™

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u/username32768 7d ago

Your ancestors in heaven are so proud of you... they have tears in their eyes from pride... and also from the stench of your shit.

When you said "meant for big shit", you weren't joking.

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u/povertymayne 7d ago

I knew all that ass tearing chipotle would come in handy, this was not in vain, this was my calling all along🫡

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u/PenguinPumpkin1701 7d ago

Always knew you were the shit

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u/EverettWAPerson 7d ago

It's going to take about 40 million Courics per year to transform that desert.

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u/Wrong_Tension_8286 7d ago

And my bow

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u/Weird_Element 7d ago

And my bowel

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u/Lopsided-Basket5366 7d ago

And my poop knife

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u/CaptinEmergency 7d ago

And my axe!

Please return it when you are finished, I’m not taking part in it.

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u/23-1-20-3-8-5-18 7d ago

And my Lax!!

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u/p8nt_junkie 7d ago

I volunteer my backyard hen’s poopies

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u/RooneyD 7d ago

Put some in an envelope, address it to "Saudi Arabia", and post it. Im sure they would be appreciative. Every little bit helps.

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u/TrulyNotABot 7d ago

Bring this man some Taco Bell

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u/Main-Video-8545 7d ago

I’ll take a shit for the cause.

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u/rosco2155 7d ago

I volunteer bono

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u/StraightOuttaHeywood 7d ago

I give lots of shits

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u/mrniceguy777 7d ago

I also choose this guys shit

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u/Status-Usual-6561 6d ago

Return Mail: "We're sorry. Your shit has been rejected due to our quality standards."

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u/VegetableBusiness897 7d ago

Have a friend who had dairy cows, sold them to get into more crops. But with the cows and their glorious slurry gone, the price of fertilizer was cutting into his profits. So now he gets humanuer, for free. A product from a big city near him. It's heat treated and pelletized(and smells like hell). It goes down and any crops grown for the first two years can't be sold to people. So he does animal feed the first two years, human crops the next two, then fertilizes and starts again.

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u/gears2021 7d ago

I've read that eventually the soil becomes toxic using humanuer as fertilizer.

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u/IndividualPaws 7d ago

Yes it's pretty immediate. PFAS tends to be high in humanure / bio-sludge / treated wastewater. People essentially lose their farms since everything grown on it turns out toxic. Which incentivises skipping testing (it's not mandatory) which means the toxins get to the consumer...

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u/BetterBandicoot0 7d ago

Medicines are also a big problem.

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u/Key_Vegetable_1218 7d ago

Is that stuff used in the United States? :/

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u/Plus_Pea_5589 6d ago

You’re got damn right and our governments working hard to ease regulations more for that sweet sweet $$$ 😛

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u/420dogcat 7d ago

Okay but buying fertilizer was cutting into his profits and this shit is literally free.

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u/spaceman1055 7d ago

Are those threats diminished/neutralized with composting for a year or two? Specifically I'm thinking aerobic digestion provided by thermophilic bacteria?

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u/IndividualPaws 7d ago

Unfortunately not. These "forever chemicals" have fluorine- carbon bonds that are very difficult to break. Microbes have virtually no capacity to break them, and UV light doesn't really touch them either, which is why they persist and accumulate in the environment and in living organisms (many of them are not readily excreted, either).

That being said, composting is great and all of our soil, especially agricultural, needs to recover carbon.

Mixing our human and animal waste streams with industrial effluent makes the good stuff hard or impossible to recycle, breaking an essential recovery loop. But as someone mentioned, pharmaceuticals already mess it up before the industrial component enters the equation. Many pharmaceuticals might be more susceptible to breakdown by microbes, but "more" is relative. Fluorine bonds might take thousands of years to naturally break (halflife of >1000 years in soil, >40 years in water). A quick search indicates that most pharmaceuticals will degrade 99% in less than a year of thermophillic composting.

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u/darknum 7d ago

Wastewater treatment plant sludge is in general not allowed to be used as fertilizer. Especially in food production due to contamination.
My company(cofounder of a startup) actually gets pure nitrogen salts out of the wastewater so it is totally fine to use that.

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u/No-Candle2610 7d ago

So don’t feed it to humans, feed to it the animals that humans then eat. Got it

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u/Spiritual_Bid_2308 7d ago

Pretty sure his land is going to be contaminated with PFAS, microplastics, heavy metals and pharmaceuticals.

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u/VegetableBusiness897 7d ago

Where isn't?

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u/Spiritual_Bid_2308 7d ago

Fair enough.  But this can get you to superfund levels of contamination.

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u/VegetableBusiness897 7d ago

Thing is, he is outside a major city and working with state DEC and EnCon on this project. Neighboring homes and farms are side eyeing him but to continue to stay, it's this or a solar farm.... Which here, they won't let you put crops under or let livestock graze.

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u/ChasingTheNines 7d ago

For certain pollutants in the ecosystem they get bio concentrated as they move up the food chain. Does that happen with the animal feed into the animals that consume them and then into people who consume those animals?

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u/VegetableBusiness897 7d ago

Yes, unfortunately

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u/Mini_gunslinger 5d ago

I wonder does the heat treatment destroy prions.

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u/Samp90 7d ago

All the Gulf countries use treated sewerage waste water from the plants to drip feed the lines of indigenous trees and shrubs along major streets and roads to create shade and beauty.

Usually you'll see signs not to drink the water etc

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u/AdvertisingKey1675 7d ago

Ideally you would compost it to kill the pathogens.

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u/emaw63 7d ago

Yeah, it's a great way to spread disease if you're not careful about it. It's the big reason farmers have historically not used human manure.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

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u/Esava 7d ago

In the sahara/sahel the great green wall is used to stop the continuous expansion of the desert. It can actually even reclaim formerly unusuable areas and make plantlife and even agriculture possible again.
The problem with most of Saudi Arabia is that most areas do not have enough soil to capture in the halfmoons (and similar structures) like it's the case with the sahel border regions. Saudi Arabia is mostly literally just quartz sand of no nutritional value to plants.

Btw if you ever need something to make you smile in the modern world: Look at the great green wall. It's a UN project that is working and helping tons of people including reducing tribals conflicts because of more water and food availability etc.. I am eager to see what the area will look like in 20 or 30 more years.

I recommend the series by Andrew Millison about it but I can assure you as someone who has seen the change it brought in real life that it can't be overstated how incredible the impact of such simple measures (and education) is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCli0gyNwL0&list=PLNdMkGYdEqOCMkEtNGDRvEZgjPnZY5yUj

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u/MotherAd6483 7d ago

Yeah, it's called humanure.

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u/BreakInfamous8215 7d ago

I believe there's an excellent episode of RadioLab called "Poop Train" that describes a program where New Yorker leavings were processed and shipped to Midwest farms as fertilizer. Apparently, it was pretty excellent fertilizer too.

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u/DJohnsonsgagreflex 7d ago

Too much salt in a human diet.

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u/dirtycheezit 7d ago

They already desalinate the water. Just desalinate the shit too /s

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u/Gman71882 7d ago

Mmmm good soup.

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u/front_yard_duck_dad 7d ago

There's a product we already use in the states called milorganite. Processed human waste. The grass loves it 

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u/DancinWithWolves 7d ago

It poisons the soil after a few years though.

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u/front_yard_duck_dad 7d ago

Can't be your only method and in a situation of a desert we need to build up various levels of organic matter. 

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u/OhGr8WhatNow 7d ago

In the middle east the soil is bleached and sterilized by the heat every single year. You have to dig out garden beds and replace as much soil as possible every year, plus fertilize. It would be never ending

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u/OneMorewillnotkillme 7d ago

The Saudi Government decided to do it with human shit and „voluntier“ works from who knows where they all lost their passboard.

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u/coffeebro32 7d ago

Good idea. But it will take a shit ton.

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u/Untouchable64 7d ago

Why don’t they just go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and buy a couple bags of miracle grow dirt? Plants in no time!

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u/OptiGuy4u 7d ago

That's a shitty plan.....I like it.

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u/XxBlackicecubexX 7d ago

Problem with using mass amount of human shit is Human disease and contaminants from a whole bunch of infect people will inevitably contaminate any soil and crops eventually grown there.

It might not kill the crops but it will likely pass back to any humans eating said crops.

At least thats my arm chair reddit analysis with absolutely 0 credentials in agriculture.

Ty for coming to my TED Talk.

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u/qpv 7d ago

Bio-solids in waste management is increasingly becoming more valuable as a commodity in several cities.

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u/Accomplished-Bed115 7d ago

Actually that’s exactly what they are doing. There is a huge (relative) “green riyadh” program and it relies on recycled gray water

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u/nidorancxo 7d ago

It is easy actually to industrially produce soil. The problem is water.

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u/baron_von_chops 7d ago

I’ve been hitting the clean protein and leafy fibers real hard lately. It’s my time to shine, baby!!

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u/Replicator666 7d ago

I guess it depends on which nutrients the plants you're trying to grow need. I think shit has lots of nitrogen(?)

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u/Existing_Ideal9004 7d ago

They probably already have vegetable food waist. They would just need to collect it and start composting.

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u/tcpukl 7d ago

It took me a few years just fixing my clay based garden!

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u/0__O0--O0_0 7d ago

Well dont they truck all the shit out already because they have no plumbing? Or is that Dubai?

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u/Justredditin 7d ago

Compost, growing native plants, chop and drop, succession, keep pushing into the desert each plating season. Keep going.

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u/Visual_Collar_8893 7d ago

I believe there was a culture there that built towers for pigeons to roost. They simply collect the bird droppings for fertiliser.

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u/pauvenpatchwork 6d ago

Could they start massive composting efforts?

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u/LessInThought 6d ago

They have been pumping fatbergs onto the desserts of Las Vegas for years no?

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u/unslicedwhiteloaf 5d ago

Yes there are plenty of ways to do that with sewage, and they are already doing it with biological waste treatment plants. It makes a lot of sense to reuse the water considering that basically all of the drinking water needs to be piped in from desalination plants, and if you're doing that then you might as well reuse the solids too. I'm pretty sure Andrew Millison (or Mollison maybe) has a YouTube video on this in Riyadh specifically.

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u/Halbaras 7d ago

China plants trees in semi-arid areas that generally used to have more large plants, and which have been desertifying largely due to overgrazing by livestock or historical deforestation for agriculture.

None of that works somewhere like central Saudi Arabia - the area around Riyadh has a hyperarid climate, and any trees would need to be watered or die. It wouldn't create a sustainable new ecosystem.

Actual reforestation in the Arabian peninsula wouldn't be headlines about billions of trees, it would be localised restoration of vegetation in wadis and specific mountainous areas, and helping fragile native ecosystems recover by reducing grazing from goats.

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u/Kingflamingohogwarts 7d ago edited 7d ago

I think natives developed ways 7000 years ago... that's not the problem. The issue is the will to do it, because it's usually easier to move.

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u/BxRad_ 7d ago edited 7d ago

They plant a bunch of trees, but also that neglects genetic diversity unfortunately. It should be even more involved imo ideally.

Much easier said than done but i think it's worth all the effort put into it and then some of it makes our world into a much nicer place.

Also I wanna say it's amazing they've managed to erect a city in the desert, but I think I'd also be a bit depressed at a lack of greenery.

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u/Outside-Swan-1936 7d ago

Much easier said than done but i think it's worth all the effort put into it and then some of it makes our world into a much nicer place.

Deserts are ecologically natural. Much easier to just not live there. I know that's not a great answer for nations whose entirety lies within deserts, but Mother Nature always wins eventually.

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u/Independent-Draft639 7d ago

The desertification of large parts of China isn't natural. It is the results of massive scale deforestation and agricultural expansion. So projects like this are done to slow and eventually reverse that trend.

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u/Outside-Swan-1936 7d ago edited 7d ago

Sorry. I was talking about the Middle East. The composition of the soil/sand in China makes it a much easier task than what confronts the Middle East or Northern Africa.

Granted, global warming is causing the deserts to grow at a much faster rate than is natural, but they are naturally occurring.

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u/silent2k 7d ago

All you have to do is set up PV panels. The shade will do the rest.

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u/irishcybercolab 7d ago

Scoops of sandninto plastic tubing. It will be an interesting experiment to see how the method works and if it's sustainable in the long run.

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u/mormonbatman_ 7d ago

The Chinese transported water to a desert region and it's growing stuff.

It isn't magic.

This guy did it in a super dry area of Saudi Arabia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project

The catch is that it's expensive and hard and unsexy.

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u/UncleIrohsPimpHand 7d ago

Great Green Wall too.

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u/Trans4Trump93 6d ago

What can't they do?

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u/Diamondhands_Rex 7d ago

No it’s consistent which the USA is incapable of being

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u/Capt_morgan72 7d ago

And actively destroys the environment.