Rose George Quotes

Along with all the other stunning statistics China can provide, it can also claim to be the world leader in making energy from human excrement. Biogas, as this energy is known, can be produced from the fermentation of any organic material, from wood to vegetables to human excreta.

Felixstowe, the United Kingdom’s largest port, stops work only for Christmas Day and for crane-toppling Force 9 gales.

In the early 19th century, they tried selling soap as healthy. No one bought it. They tried selling it as sexy, and everyone bought it.

All that is known for sure is that endometriosis is endemic and that it cannot be cured. Management is the best hope. This makes for treatments that are, if I am being polite, based on trial and error. If I am feeling less generous, they are shots in the dark.

In 2000, twice as much water was used throughout the world as in 1960. By 2050, half of the planet’s projected 8.9 billion people will live in countries that are chronically short of water.

Some countries have more water than others – some can afford to use clean water to flush their poop away, and some can’t.

The first thing I did when I decided that I was going to dive into the world of poop was look at who was doing stuff in that world. The first I came across was the World Toilet Organization. So one of the first things I did was to go to their annual show in Moscow.

Ninety percent of what we wear, we eat, we consume is carried by ships… Container ships carry a vast amount of stuff.

Before containers, transport costs ate up 25 percent of the value of whatever was being shipped.

As for restaurants and fast-food places who tip tons of oil down their drains, they are routinely encouraged to use fat traps, but enforcement is minimal. It costs money to cart away fat (although now that fat is being turned into energy, it can make money).

We see the sea as this place of leisure and this place, you know, a blue patch on the map to fly over because we all go by plane these days, mostly. And we don’t really see it as a place of industry anymore.

We know about man’s impact on the ocean in terms of fishing and overfishing, but we don’t really know much about what’s happening underneath the water. And in fact, shipping has a role to play here, because shipping noise has contributed to damaging the acoustic habitats of ocean creatures.

In some of the great cities of Europe – Paris, Vienna, Prague, and Brussels – tourists bored with life above ground can descend below. All these cities have sewer museums and tours, and all expose their underbelly willingly to the curious. But not London, arguably the home of the most splendid sewer network in Europe.

We are using the same water that the dinosaurs drank, and this same water has to make ice creams in Pasadena and the morning frost in Paris.

You’ve probably been asked to care about things like HIV/AIDS or T.B. or measles, but diarrhea kills more children than all those three things put together. It’s a very potent weapon of mass destruction.

Ships are obliged to take on harbor or river pilots – who provide specialized local navigation – when they approach a port, but in the canal, a Suez crew is also obligatory. The crew members are there in case the ship needs to be moored during the canal transit, but this rarely happens.

I think about what’s going down my sink. So I won’t pour oil down my sink. I won’t – if I’m cleaning a pan, I’ll wipe it and bin because I’ve seen – I’ve been down sewers.

There are more than one hundred thousand ships at sea carrying all the solids, liquids and gases that we need to live.

It’s difficult on a ship to get away from your job because that accommodation house, which is where seafarers live, is their workplace, it’s where they live, it’s where they relax, it’s everything, and it’s just hard to get away. And seafarers often refer to their job as being in prison with a salary.

Because sanitation has so many effects across all aspects of development – it affects education, it affects health, it affects maternal mortality and infant mortality, it affects labor – it’s all these things, so it becomes a political football. Nobody has full responsibility.

Diarrhea, 90 percent of which is caused by food and water contaminated by excrement, kills a child every fifteen seconds. That’s more than AIDS, malaria, or measles, combined. Human feces are an impressive weapon of mass destruction.

What they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they’ve brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. They’ve made it conversational. People go out and upgrade their toilet. They talk about it. They’ve sanitized it.

The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European, on one ship.

I find Maersk fascinating. It is the Coca-Cola of freight with none of the fame. Its parent company, A. P. Moller-Maersk, is Denmark’s largest company, its sales equal to 20 percent of Denmark’s GDP; its ships use more oil than the entire nation.

The more ships have grown in size and consequence, the more their place in our imagination has shrunk.

Sewage works that serve big cities run into trouble when the cities grow up around them.

There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route.

Shipping is the greenest method of transport. In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. But it’s not benign, because there’s so much of it. So shipping emissions are about three to four percent, almost the same as aviation’s.

In the Communist era, excrement took on political importance, because Party policy decided excrement was essential for the Great Agricultural Leap Forward.

Since the 1920s, when some U.S. cruise ships decided to fly a Panamanian flag to avoid Prohibition regulations, ships have commonly flown the flag of countries foreign to their owners. The benefits are obvious: lower taxes, laxer labor and safety laws.

Research into endometriosis is as scanty as funding.