From filth to wealth!

A fascinating news item, based on a UK news report, appeared in a local daily in its last page on March 25. Without any doubt whatsoever, it could very well be the most exciting news of the 21st century. The US scientists can be trusted to find out the huge potential of our earning tremendous riches from solid human waste. Most of us will be surprised to imagine that our faeces yield valuable metals, like platinum, gold and silver. Researchers in US discovered microscopic nuggets of silver, gold and platinum in faeces by electronic scanning at a sewage disposal plant. It is believed, that feaces from a million Americans can produce precious metals (silver, gold and platinum) worth around US$13 million, per day although no time frame was given. However in all probability, that seems to be the logical time frame.
Given our vast population, we in Bangladesh can easily expect yield of precious metals, say amounting to around US$1.0 billion, if not daily at least weekly. This is where our vast numbers of people are a real potential for providing wealth to the country. Once this process of getting precious metals is established here, we can forget all about population control.
One wonders, if the yield of precious metals is co-related to quality of diet inputs. In that case we may get reduced yield of precious metals as our average diet is much simpler and is more bland than the average everyday US diet per head. However, even if our precious metal yield per head is less than half of that in USA, nevertheless the wealth that we can earn is not negligible. We can then go all out for agriculture development and from the wealth earned from human feaces, we can go for farming fruits and other variety of vegetables and grow more fish, to enrich our diet, so that the precious metal yield can match the average US yield.
We must give top priority to this research and send our scientists and researchers to USA for hands-on experience in the matter. They can work and learn from US researchers the required expertise on the study and recovery of precious metals from human solid waste that could well turn out to be our valuable asset in the decades to come.
The writer is an engineer who has nearly 50 years of experience in various industries.
sam@dhakacom.com