Wee My Valentine: An Hour with Wastewater Expert Nancy Love

SHHH: The Poopcast (aka S**t and Shame with Shawn)

Building water infrastructure in Addis Ababa, filtering Flint’s taps to keep kids healthy, and tackling traditional paradigms of where to put your pee. In this episode, Shawn Shafner (The Puru) sits down with Nancy Love--professor, pioneer, engineer and expert who literally wrote the book on Biological Wastewater Treatment. Often the lone woman in a male-dominated field, Nancy recounts how a little girl on the family golf course became one of the most sought-after professors at the University of Michigan, and hypothesizes why women might do a better job of solving humanity's problems. Plus, we’ll tour a centralized Wastewater Treatment Plant, appreciate the promise of decentralized sanitation systems, and learn why the National Science Foundation has given her a lot of money to study how urine could fertilize our amber waves of grain. So grab a drink, and an empty cup, and prepare to connect with all the waters around, under and in you. Also mentioned in this podcast: Urine diversion summit, water, sanitation, technology, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, civil engineer, wastewater, stormwater, groundwater, University of Michigan, open defecation, pit latrine, fecal sludge, source separation, infrastructure, septic system, Vermont, Mathew Lippincott, recycling, golf, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson, gender equality, Milorganite, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, biosolids, Nitrogen, phosphorous, carbon, Virginia Tech, Chesapeake Bay, grit, Clean Water Act, aeration, bacteria, sustainable resource recovery, microbial fuel cell, bioelectrolysis, Sashti Balasundaram, WE Radiate, Kim Nace, Abe Noe-Hays, fertilizer, struvite, Haber-Bosch