I remember being told when I was a child to be careful what you wish for. This is so true because I was lost in thought today and if someone wished to know what I was thinking about, I would say I was thinking of ways sewage could be turned into a road.
The reason I was thinking this was because Sewage costs nothing so if you could make a civil infrastructure product out of it, you would save the tax payer a lot of money.
This is what I came up with. The sewage would be burnt and the ashes from the sewage would be combined with waste plastics that have been ground up into a fine powder. When Feces are burnt then they are no longer Feces but ashes. The microbes that made it stink are destroyed and the compounds that the microbes we're feeding on would be consumed by the fire. Sewage is more than Feces, it is urine, cleaning chemicals, toilet paper and countless other things so when the water content of the sewage is removed and the stuff is burnt to ashes you would find that every grain of ash has different properties. Some of them would be hard glass like grains. Others would be very brittle and some would be heat resistant. When combined to the finely ground waste plastic powder and heated, you would have a composite material that takes advantage of the properties of many different grains. The plastic is sticky when heated and binds things together and it is flexible, it can move and flex slightly without breaking. The ashes would be heat resistant and would not go more brittle when it is exposed to ultra violet Ray's and some of the grains would be as strong as stone.
Like all deep thoughts in this world there is more to this, you see the sewage is almost entirely made up of water. To burn the sewage the water must be removed, to do this I thought that the sewage could be pumped into a large air-tight tank. The air in the tank is pumped out, this would lower the boiling point of the water. The water would boil away and the pump would continue to pump out the water vapour until there is a dry mass of stuff to release into the furnace. The heat form burning the sewage would power the grinding machines that turn waste plastic into fine powder.
Could we build roads out of two products that have no cost? Sewage and Waste Plastic. Who knows?
