Illinois Researchers Examine Link Between Ecosystem and Resource Recovery

Human waste might be an unpleasant public health burden, but scientists at the University of Illinois see sanitation as a valuable facet of global ecosystems and an overlooked source of nutrients, organic material and water. Their research, directed by civil and environmental engineering professor Jeremy Guest, is reported in the journal Nature Sustainability. Human beings derive benefits from the ecosystems around them – services that often go undervalued in traditional economic systems, the researchers say. These ecosystem benefits include things like forests providing wood as a building material and natural hydrological processes that improve water quality. “In previous research, we have shown that