Floors Made of Shit

Would you imagine yourself living on shit?

In the future, this could be a reality, as a team at Michigan State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture states that fiber from processed and sterilized cow manure could replace sawdust in making fiberboard, employed to make furniture from floorboards to shelves.

And the new fiberboard does not smell like dung!

This technology would solve the problem of the 1.5 - 2-trillion pound annual farm waste disposal in the US.

Manure was used traditionally to fertilize fields but the increasingly larger and more specialized dairy farms encounter too few fields for their manure. Moreover, population living next to such fields won't appreciate the odors spread by manure. "Farmers are having to put more and more money into dealing with manure,'' said Tim Zauche, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville. "This is a huge cost to farmers. A dairy farm can spend $200 per cow per year to handle its manure," Zauche said.

Many farmers are forced to invest in anaerobic digesters (photo), systems that under heat conditions ferment, deodorize and sterilize the manure, producing methane employed to generate electricity.

The semisolid remains, rich in phosphorus, are used as fertilizer. "We really need to think outside the box on what uses for manure are,'' said Wendy Powers, a professor of agriculture at Michigan State University.

The experiments made to get various types of fiberboards employing the "digester solids" combine the fibers using a chemical resin, at heat and pressure, like in the case of wood-based ones. Surprisingly, manure-made fiberboards seem to be better than those made of wood. "It appears that the fibers interlock with each other better than wood,'' said Charles Gould at Michigan State's College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. The manure-based fiberboards "performed very well in mechanical tests, in many cases meeting or exceeding the standard requirements for particleboard.''

"One good thing about the manure-based fiber is cost, who is working as a consultant on the USDA lab's research project. It's cheaper than dirt", said Zauche. "Whether that's enough to overcome the public's squeamishness about using a manure byproduct as a building product remains to be seen," said Craig Adair, spokesman for APA-The Engineered Wood Association, a Tacoma, Wash.-based group that represents the plywood industry. "If nobody in industry has an interest, it will die,'' Adair said.