When New York-based journalist Lina Zeldovich visited Israel on a fellowship at Ben-Gurion University in 2018, she met Amit Gross and Yair Teller — two Israeli scientists who take the adage “Waste not, want not,” quite literally.

Gross, a Ben-Gurion University researcher, and Teller, president and co-founder of Beit Yanai-based HomeBiogas, were transforming human waste into biofuel, fertilizer, or both. And while it may be true that poop can’t be polished, the Start-Up Nation’s researchers had found a way of repurposing it — and were even helping some of their Palestinian neighbors do the same business.

In 2015 under a program called Partnership for Peace, Teller and HomeBioGas CEO Oshik Efrati sent some of their company’s portable “anaerobic digesters,” which turn organic waste into methane, to Palestinian villagers in isolated parts of the West Bank. The project brought together Israeli and Palestinian students, and later models have gone to Gaza on behalf of the UN and Red Cross.

Overall, Zeldovich told The Times of Israel, “I think the way the [Israelis] approach their waste repurposing, for a small country, the variety of ideas, I think it is really pretty impressive.”

Similar innovations are taking place around the world, and for Zeldovich, it’s about time. She’s been looking for mainstream society to reform its waste management ever since her days growing up in a family of Jewish scientists in the former Soviet Union. Now she’s writing about her findings in a new book, “The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste Into Wealth and Health.”

You may never learn so much about poop again — or read so many poop-related puns from fellow authors who blurbed it. Mary Ellen Hannibal saluted Zeldovich’s book as an “indispensable” read “about what we might call the Anthro-poo-cene,” while Mary Roach declared, “This is some good shit, people.”

And so it is. The book addresses the question of what exactly happens after we flush the toilet — and how societies have tackled that very subject since the dawn of civilization.

Readers encounter an example of Roman architecture that’s just as lasting as the Colosseum, the roads and the aqueducts — namely, the Cloaca Maxima, the epic sewer system of the Eternal City.

They learn the 19th-century London origins of a widely-used waste management technique in the West that improved the standard of living but still harms the environment.

And they meet innovators around the world who are looking to change the conventional wisdom by upcycling poop as a biofuel, fertilizer or even medicine (people can donate their poop for fecal transplants credited with saving lives).

Poop is even relevant when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic: Biobot, a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, uses robots to plumb sewage systems for signs of the coronavirus that may help predict future outbreaks.

It is an ambitious subject, and, according to the author, an urgent one — poop is rich in nitrogen, and this chemical leaches out of sewage pipes, damaging vital marsh ecosystems in what she calls “the great sewage time bomb.” It’s also a topic widely dismissed as smelly, gross, unappetizing, pathogen-laden, you name it — this is poop we’re talking about, after all. Multiple publishers turned down Zeldovich’s idea before the University of Chicago Press said yes.

“It took a long time to germinate seeds with this, to sort of conjure it up,” Zeldovich said. “To believe I could get a publisher interested in it, then a society interested in it. It took a lot of time for me to believe.”

At the same time, there is a rising interest. Poop is inspiring poetry, performance art, museum exhibits, even an entire museum in India. The Monday after the Super Bowl (which this year fell out on Valentine’s Day) has been declared National Poop Day. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recognized the seriousness of the issue in 2011, when it started a competition to build a better toilet, citing billions of people who still live without adequate sanitation and the health hazards that result from this.

“In the last decade, I saw attitudes toward poo were changing,” Zeldovich said. “At a societal level, I started to see several people wanting to know what poo is, what happens to it. It was no longer taboo.”

Zeldovich herself has been thinking about waste management since her childhood in the Soviet Union. Her grandfather liked to compost, and she came to realize that poop was not a disgusting object but a valuable commodity that nourished the family garden. She was amazed by how he upcycled the family’s waste into fertilizer, using it to grow food for the dinner table. Soviet bureaucrats eventually compelled the family to relocate, ending the composting but not Zeldovich’s interest.

As a journalist, she found that her articles that received the most clicks were poop-related. Two of them even won awards.

For one story, she traveled to Madagascar, where she encountered unsanitary conditions in the capital of Antananarivo — open latrines that overflow when it rains, spreading sewage into the streets and contaminating the water supply. She interviewed the staff of Loowatt, a startup looking to change such practices. The company designs toilets with bags that collect human waste. Drivers pick up the bags and bring them to a central laboratory, where the waste is repurposed into biogas and fertilizer. Zeldovich recalls walking into a room filled with crates and boxes of human excrement.

“The research and development lab I walked into had a room literally full of fermenting shit all around me,” she said.

The staff all wanted to shake her hand. After a pause, she did so. Reflecting later on, she realized that if all that poop had already been transformed into compost, it was likely safe anyway.

In the United States, she says, the predominant waste management practice is to use a sewer system. Sewage is flushed down toilets and flows through underground pipes into a sewage plant, where it is processed. Wastewater is removed, treated and returned to the environment, while the remaining biosolid is used as landfill or burned.

This system, Zeldovich points out, has several problems. It is built to process both sewage and rainwater, and when it rains, excess H20 is diverted into bodies of water, along with raw sewage. Then there’s the nitrogen leaching out from the pipes, wreaking havoc on marshlands such as the ones Zeldovich studied in Massachusetts.

“Aquatic life evolved to live with low levels of nutrients,” she said. “Too much of the wrong stuff, and toxic algae crowds out all other life, sucks up a lot of oxygen out of the water. It’s when every [other aquatic] life starts dying. It’s particularly true of coastal marshes, a very important ecosystem.”

Zeldovich sees better practices from past societies that used poop to boost poor soils. (As you’ll find, not every society was so enlightened.) In feudal Japan, workers collected poop, stored it on ships and repurposed it as fertilizer. As Zeldovich explains, this benefited Japan’s soils to the extent that poop became a prized commodity, even sparking fights over who got to collect it.

Similar systems existed in pre-industrial China, and among the Flemish in the Low Countries. The latter found that their soils were poor enough to necessitate fertilizer not only from human excrement, but also from urine, dog poop and chicken poop.

Back in the present-day US, Zeldovich praises the approach along the Eastern Seaboard.

New York City’s main waste disposal plant in Brooklyn offers tours on an unlikely but popular date — Valentine’s Day. Zeldovich recalls a February 14 trip to the mammoth site — a panoramic cityscape above, the poop of 1 million New Yorkers below, with giant structures called digester eggs processing it into biogas, aided by bacteria. Yet she laments that NYC doesn’t repurpose its poop for fertilizer as extensively as Washington, DC.

She said that the reason is that there’s “actually too much [poop], New York City overproduces it.”

While it wouldn’t be possible to redistribute all the resulting fertilizer locally, Zeldovich says that it would be great if they could ship it back to the Midwest to grow food, or near Florida or California. But, she says, the time and expense make that a long shot for now.

In the nation’s capital, she visits a waste management site that processes the city’s poop — including bipartisan poop from the White House and the Capitol — into biogas and fertilizer. The latter is sold as a product called BLOOM. According to Zeldovich, BLOOM looks and smells like soil, and is safe to use.

“I think their method of dealing with sewage is really brilliant,” Zeldovich said. “To me, it’s the most complete to what my grandfather used to do, on a grand scale.”

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