For Sale at the Zine Symposium all Weekend via the Research Club booth
where: Peter Scott Main Gym at PSU
724 SW Harrison and SW Park Ave.
when: Saturday 10 am to 5 pm Sunday 10am to 1 pm (1pm is the Research Club Brunch! right next to the Zine Symposium)

six posters for $5
or 12 posters for $7!
or get them for free if you promise to put them up in restrooms around Portland.
Here’s a taste of the illustration without text

Taking the Pee (draft audio) from Dylan McIntyre on Vimeo.

Dinner is $10 at the Pacific Northwest College of Art at 1241 NW Johnson and NW 12th Ave at 6pm this Sunday.

Attendees can read short summaries of the projects and ask any questions they want of the artists. Every diner gets a vote for $10 and the majority determines who gets the funds. Obviously there’s a lot of motivation to stack the deck by sending all our friends to show up and you can but you have to RSVP pronto since space and food are finite (on this reality plane).

RSVP pronto to portlandstock@gmail.com. People sending RSVPs after Tuesday or Wednesday might not make the list for dinner seating and will be instead invited to sit in the $5 peanut gallery (meaning they can vote but don’t get dinner).

Or Eat & Vote for Free by Volunteering: If you (or your friends) are interested in volunteering to help set up, clean up, or cook, please let Portland Stock know. Volunteers eat and vote for free!

for those interested here’s our proposal:
1. Project Summary: (100 words)

Every time it rains in Portland we participate in a “system” officially known as C.S.O., Combined Sewage Overflow. It’s an engineeringy acronym for what we prefer to call S.I.R., Shitting In Rivers, a form of ideocy dating back before Roman times. We have created a series of six posters illustrating current waste management practices (like S.I.R) and simple, cheap, science-based alternatives. We’re seeking money to create a revolving print fund so we can produce and distribute our posters, with sales feeding back in to the fund.

2. How will you use the funding toward the realization of your project? (50 words)

We will print 6 posters designed for bathroom reading and sell them at a cost that will cover public postings and additional print runs in perpetuity. Posters: Portland’s sewage system, Portland’s composting system, decomposition on an ecosystem and molecular level, neighborhood biological waste processing greenhouses, and clever animals that compost.

3. How will it manifest at the next Stock event? (100 words):

We will have printed the posters and distributed them around town using a guerrilla network of school teachers, public employees, artists and activists including Recode, Phlush, City Repair, Red & Black Cafe , Black Rose, Laughing Horse, North Star, Autonomy Hive, and Research Club. We will put them in mundane bathrooms, radical spaces, book stores, and semi-legal waste-management sites. We will also be, hopefully, on our way towards online sales.

4. Why is this project important? (100 words)

We feel the best way to inspire change is to spread info-rich graphics backed up by an alternative system of infrastructure that people can easily participate in. We are actively prototyping networked compost monitoring and urine/capture and re-use systems. Our goal is to initiate a distributed system of independently run and electronically monitored compost piles and collectors that rapidly and efficiently transform the bulk of our human and municipal waste into verified, pathogen-free soil with a minimum of attention and area. To do that we need ramp up excitement and understanding amongst Portlanders.

F*ck apathy, deal with your sh*t!

A visual overview of activities at the plant.

I was very humbled by our visit to the Columbia Waste Treatment Plant in North East Portland. The plant manages the waste of 614,000 Portlanders which amounts to about 120 million gallons per day in the dry season and 300 million gallons per day in the wet season. 99% of the water coming in to the plants is rain water or potable water and the other 1% is human excrement, food wastes and various commercial wastes. The main problem with water borne sewage is that it doesn’t matter how little of the actual contents are waste, it all looks and smells like sh*t water. The work of the Columbia waste treatment plant is to separate the waste from the water in order to reuse the wastes as nutrients for dry pasture land in Eastern Oregon and return clean water to our local watershed. In the end they are able to separate much of the water from the waste to create what are called ”biosolids” which are treated solid waste that only contain 80% water. It was hard for me to look at all the energy and engineering that is put into this process to get the waste from 99% water to 80% water. If there’s one thing I learned it’s that it’s really hard to separate waste from water and keep the EPA happy.

The engineers we met with were very kind and gave generously of their time and expertise to show us how they return such vile stuff safely to our ecosystem. The awesome thing about engineers at Columbia Boulevard’s plant is that they’re very aware of how ridiculous it is to combine storm runoff with sewage, but they’re also very realistic. They’re very aware that it’s hard to retrospectively change a system that relies on 2,000 miles of underground pipe without which we couldn’t even make it through our morning routines. I was really excited that one of the engineers is interested in putting in a graywater garden now that it’s legalized thanks to the hard work of Recode.

Aeratation Tank at Columbia Boulevard Treatment Plant

When trying to imagine a world where all waste is composted and returned to the soil it’s humbling to remember that even if we assume that 1% of the liquid coming to the plant is waste, that’s still about 1.2 million gallons of waste every day that needs to be dealt with. In other words, if our sewage wasn’t waterborne the city of Portland would fill up one Olympic pool every 28 days with sewage. If we were trying to compost that waste it’d have to be mixed with an Olympic pool’s worth of sawdust or other carbon matter. It’s a lot of sh*t, but not quite as large as I imagined.

The Columbia Waste treatment plant is constantly trying to improve it’s performance and it was fascinating to see what they’re tried over the years. At one point they tried composting the sewage sludge into Class A biosolids (they currently only create Class B biosolids) using aerobic decomposition. It was pretty much a gigantic mechanized version of our home composter. They found that composting sludge on a large scale required very particular types of carbon feedstock to provide enough carbon (for the microbes) and enough structure to keep each batch aerated. Since the sludge is 80 to 90% water when it enters the compost the wood chips need to be pretty large. When you’re shopping around for an Olympic pool’s worth of wood chips to be delivered consistently every month there’s not many suppliers, maybe one or two. They found that they weren’t able to find a supplier willing to screen the material to remove smaller wood chips. The composter was actively aerated and depended on the wood chips to bulk up the sludge enough to create an environment for aerobic bacteria. Nowadays the composter is filled with wood chips and used as a biofilter to process any odor in the exhaust air from the process.

Thanks again Dept of Environmental Services for all the help!