Flushing meadows: Prospect Park to use human waste as fertilizer

So you saw the East River Park gardening day event going on this weekend but you already know you can’t make it. But you still want to help beautify the city parks. Good for you! And fortunately, in a couple of years, you’re going to be able to do the job sitting down. That’s because Prospect Park is getting a new set of toilets that will turn human waste into fertilizer. Being a humanitarian and an environmentalist has never sounded easier!

And before you go accusing us of another brilliant April Fool’s joke, keep in mind that the news comes from the Daily News. And it’s March. Despite the fact that it sounds like a Tim and Eric bit, Prospect Park is dead serious about this project, which will convert the park’s Well House into a bathroom. In those bathrooms, instead of being sent into the city’s sewage system, your waste will flow down to underground holding tanks that also have woodchips and special microbes. After collecting and mixing for what sounds like a really, really long five years, the tanks will be emptied and used as compost for the park. Hello, future worst job in Brooklyn.

There’s a couple caveats here, the bigest one being that it’s currently illegal to fertilize plants with human waste. Christian Zimmerman is hopeful the state can be persuaded to change the law by the time the tanks are full, so yeah, good luck with that. The other is that you won’t be rolling around in your own crap just yet. Not at the park anyway. The project isn’t scheduled to be finished until 2015, and even then, it will take five years before any of the poop collected from the bathroom will be used to fertilize the park. So, just in time for those of you getting married and having kids to have your kids find out about it and never want to go to the park. Ooh, that sounds nice actually. We’re telling them that starting now, actually.