Honest question: Can you grow anything out there? I guess you could do indoor farming, but maybe it's more than enough "compost" they're producing there?
It would be interesting to know if an analysis of it (when in the US) could tell some things about how the station is doing.
Not sure about McMurdo, but South Pole Station has a greenhouse, which is an awfully nice place to stick your head into now and again if you're doing any amount of time there. They grow tomatoes and lettuce, among other things, that sometimes make their way into salads for folks on-station.
I've been several times to the Pole for work (years ago), and going into the greenhouse and smelling tomato plants after days on end of smelling nothing but people, galley food, cleaning products, and fuel exhaust, is a pleasant memory.
They do not (or at least did not) use human sewage for fertilizer there -- unlike at McMurdo, human waste at Pole does not get shipped off station.
McMurdo used to have a greenhouse too - it was small and homey and lovely, in one of the cargo yards. It didn't produce nearly enough food to be useful for the summer population (except maybe fresh herbs), and from memory got torn down sometime around 2010.
I wintered at Pole, and in that rather fractious winter, I think one of the worst points was when it was decided that the whole crop in the greenhouse needed to be purged. The head of maintenance had broken the Rodwell (water supply), so there was a reasonable desire to reduce water consumption. But, somehow, that morphed in to "shut down the greenhouse", despite it being a closed-loop system... That winter, we had a very comfortable reserve of fuel, and of course South Pole Station sits on a whole lot of ice.
They would have way more sludge than they would have any use for (I understand there are a couple of greenhouses at some of the bases, but that's it). So they're not going to just dump it in one of the least polluted places in the world...
We have been dealing with American shit for years.
More seriously, it is weird. It would seem a good opportunity for us to solve one problem and benefit in some other way as a reciprocal arrangement. For example, US air supply options are likely vastly superior to ours.
I'm guessing the waste removal program isn't optimised for raw shipping costs.
They only do one ship-load per year (deliver all supplies, take all waste back). Overall logistics (including regulatory compliance) might actually make it cheaper to have a single destination, rather than stopping over in NZ to offload some of the simpler to dispose waste. Actual shipping costs are probably in the noise floor after everything else.
It's also possible the program has been partially optimised for pork barrel politics.
Island nations tend to be very against the introduction of organic stuff for fear that it might disrupt their fragile ecosystem. And solid residuals from wastewater treatment are very much the kind of organic stuff that is problematic to import.
> Here’s the final solid product, a nutrient-rich soil-like material. This is sent back to the United States.
Why send it back?