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re: why not to put cat litter in the compost pile
19 mar 2000
pat meadows wrote:
> if anyone is contemplating following elaine's advice and
>putting used cat litter in their compost pile (or dog poop,
>which i don't think she mentioned), i'd suggest that they
>first take a look at what the center for disease control has
>to say about zoonoses...
ignoring the obvious pun, how would you dispose of dog poop?
where would it go after that? my dog just poops willy-nilly
all over the ground, and so do the horses and cows. do we need
safer alternatives? perhaps the cdc and other regulatory bodies
overdo some things in order to stay employed and prosper.
>...bearing in mind that there's no guarantee just how hot
>a compost pile will get... and bearing in mind that there's
>no guarantee *all* parts of the compost - every particle in it -
>will be hot enough to be sterilized...
we might guarantee this with "in vessel composting," something
like a pressure cooker or "compost furnace" which provides useful
heat with internal temperature control and recording. something
like an "aerated static pile" with insulated walls and an oxygen
sensor that turns on a blower at less than 15% o2 to keep it aerobic
and a humidistat that sprinkles the compost with effluent from
a sump pump to maintain a 50% moisture content, or less, when a
thermostat inside the house determines that less heat is needed
from the water-water heat exchanger in the sump.
page 133 of the humanure handbook has a "pathogen death safety zone"
time-temperature graph that says, for instance, "one day at 122 f
is a time/temp combination yielding total pathogen death" (including
enteric viruses, shigella, taenia, vibrio cholera, ascaris (roundworm),
salmonella, and entamoeba histolytica.) but who's to say a single
heat-resistant organism can't emerge unscathed? life is probabilistic.
and mad cow, mad sheep, etc, disease prions apparently can't be
killed by boiling all day, so there are no guarantees in life.
nick
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