6 Valuable (And Disgusting) Ways They're Reusing Human Waste

We live in an era of recycling, where hippies scream in horror if they spot a soda can in the garbage and go into convulsions at the thought of a landfill full of paper. But if you think glass bottles, milk jugs and CSI are the only things that can be recycled, read on. The next dump you take could be used to build a school in Japan.

Beauty Treatments.

Generations of frat guys told women "It's good for your skin!" in a desperate scheme to find willing targets for their mayonnaise cannons. As it turns out, not only is this claim apparently true, but several companies are actually peddling brogurt as the next great beauty cream ingredient.

The hilariously named Cmen Beauty Now offers discreet shipping of the pure product straight to the buyer's home, along with reassurances of the stock being disease-free and provided by individuals who are "tested monthly." They really have to boast about their quality control, because their competition is a whole nation full of guys drunkenly offering to apply it directly to the customer's face at no cost (high five, bro!).

Meanwhile, Skinscience, a Scandinavian company, is marketing an entire line of Spermine beauty creams and serums. Spermine is an antioxidant found in human semen that's said to be 30 times stronger than vitamin E and able to repair sunburned skin, based on results Skinscience gathered after testing their products on 3,000 women (curiously, no men signed up to participate in the "rub sperm all over your face and sprinkle some on that sunburned back of yours as well" tests).

We note that both of these companies make zero effort to disclose where exactly they're getting their massive quantities of semen from. So until we get some transparency to this process we're forced to imagine a hand-made sign and a line of hobos that stretches all the way around the block.

Food.

Human hair is traded on a large scale, whether it be females donating their hair to Locks of Love or Sean Connery donating his chest hair to the Smithsonian. However, it disturbed us to discover that much of what is swept up from the floors of barber shops and beauty parlors winds up in our food. No, we don't mean that nasty, black, curly hair you found in your French fries last week. We mean as an FDA approved food additive.

It turns out that human hair is a main source of L-Cysteine, a substance used as a dough conditioner. It is used to speed up mixing and add elasticity, making it very popular for pizza dough and other bakery specialties. Obviously it's not still hair by the time it makes it into the food, so the hair you found in your large meat lover's was not in fact put there on purpose, unless the cook just thought it would be funny.

Except real cooks don't fuck around.

Always struggling to find ways to be more disgusting than the Western world, China figured out that human hair could be used to mimic artificially hydrolyzed soy sauce, thereby eliminating the need for any actual soy. Hair was gathered from salons, barbershops and hospitals across the country before being transformed into the popular cooking condiment (a process outlined under the "shits and giggles" section of the Chinese national budget).

A news article highlighted the practice and the Chinese government eventually banned it. In a country that doesn't exactly have top of the line safety standards for the stuff they make, even they draw the line at feeding people salty hair juice. So that's something, at least.

Medicine.

Your piss can save lives. It turns out there's a component of urine (Urokinase) that just happens to be extremely effective at breaking up blood clots, the kind that happen when someone suffers a stroke or a heart attack. Now before you decide to piss all over someone in cardiac arrest, we should mention that it takes a special filter to separate the anticoagulant goodies from the rest of the urine, though if you were going to piss on that person anyway we suppose we can't stop you.

So if doctors and stuff can use your piss, why aren't people going door to door with buckets buying it off you? And if they're not doing that, how do they collect the stuff? Well, it turns out somebody already has a whole bunch of piss on their hands...

Yes, we're talking about the Porta-John company. By treating their more than 10,000 rental toilets like giant specimen jars, they have gotten enough product to go into the production of what their website refers to as "human sourced proteins."

A filter is placed in each Porta-John, harvesting the desired proteins on a flow by flow basis while weeding out undesired clutter such as shit, used condoms and things that lay outside the dark boundaries of the human imagination. We're guessing the guy that gets sent to retrieve these filters didn't really "wow" anybody during the interview process.