Night soil

Overview
Night soil is produced as a result of a waste management system in areas without community infrastructure such as a sewage treatment facility, or individual septic disposal. In this system of waste management, the human feces are collected in solid form. Night soil is a euphemistic term for intentionally collected human feces.

Collection
Feces are excreted into a container or honey bucket, and are sometimes collected in the container with urine and other waste. Often the deposition or excretion occurs within the residence, such as in a shophouse faced with overpopulation. This system is used in isolated rural areas and is important in developing nations or in areas that lack the adequate infrastructure to have running water.

The material is collected for temporary storage and is disposed of depending on local custom.

Disposal
Disposal has varied through time. In urban areas, usually slums, a night soil collector will arrive regularly, at varying time periods depending on the supply and demand for night soil collection. Usually this occurs during the night, giving the night soil its name.

In isolated rural areas such as in farms, the household will usually dispose of the night soil themselves, but this practice is generally not referred to as night soil, though the eventual fate of the night soil, and style of handling, is similar.

After arriving at a collection point, usually as a special treatment centre within the city, or perhaps an open cesspit, methods on dealing with the waste varies. The waste may go on being shipped to another larger centre to be ultimately taken care of, or be disposed of at that particular juncture.

Sanitation issues
Without proper treatment, the use of human feces as fertiliser is a highly hazardous practice because of disease-causing microbes they contain. Nevertheless, in developing nations it is a common practice. Parasitic worm infections, such as Ascariasis in these countries are linked to night soil, since the larvae are in feces. There have also been cases of disease-carrying tomatoes, lettuce, and other vegetables being imported from undeveloped nations into more developed nations. However, night soil does not necessarily need to be reused as fertiliser and may merely be disposed of and remain unused.

Human waste may be attractive as fertiliser because of the high demand for fertiliser and the relative availability of the material to create night soil. In areas where native soil is of poor quality, the local population may weigh the risk of using night soil.

The safe reduction of human waste into compost is possible, but fairly complex. Many municipalities create compost from the city sewage system, but then recommend that it only be used on flower beds, not vegetable gardens. Some claims have been made that this is dangerous or inappropriate without the expensive removal of heavy metals.

China
The term is known, or even infamous among the generations that were born in parts of China or Chinatowns (depending on the development of the infrastructure) before 1960. Post-World War II Chinatown, Singapore before the independence of Singapore utilised night soil collection as a primary means of waste disposal, especially as much of the infrastructure was damaged and took a long time to rebuild following the Battle of Singapore and subsequent Japanese Occupation of Singapore. Following the subsequent development of the economy and the standard of living after independence, the night soil system in Singapore is now merely a curious anecdote from the time of colonial rule when new systems developed. The system has been replaced in most parts of the People's Republic of China although still present in some places.

The collection method is generally very manual and heavily relies on close human contact with the waste. During the Nationalist era when the Kuomintang ruled mainland China, as well as Chinatown in Singapore, the night soil collector usually arrived with spare and relatively empty honey buckets to exchange for the full honey buckets. The method of transporting the honey buckets from individual households to collection centres was very similar to delivering water supplies by an unskilled laborer, with the exception that the item being transported was not at all potable and it was being delivered from the household, rather than to the household. The collector would hang full honey buckets onto each end of a pole he carried on his shoulder and then proceeded to carry it through the streets until he reached the collection point. This was an unpleasant occupation and was predominately done by manual labourers.

Tudor Britain
A gong farmer was the term used in Tudor Britain for a person employed to remove human excrement from privies and cesspits. Gong farmers were only allowed to work at night and the waste they collected, had to be taken outside the city or town boundaries.

India
India's ancient caste system assigned untouchables with the disposal of night soil. This "manual scavenging" is now illegal in most Indian states, although the practice undoubtedly continues in many rural areas.

Japan
The reuse of feces as fertilizer was common in Japan. Waste products of rich people were sold at higher prices because their diet was better. Various historic documents dating from the 9th century detail the disposal procedures for toilet waste.

Selling human waste products as fertilizers became much less common after World War II, both for sanitary reasons and because of the proliferation of chemical fertilizers, and less than 1% is used for night soil fertilization.

The proper disposal or recycling of sewage remains an important research area that is highly political.