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

5 Your Hair

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).

4 Your Pee

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.

3 Your Poop

Building materials.

Putting a new twist on the old phrase "built like a brick shit house," the Japanese have found a way to make up for the annoying lack of natural building materials in their country by patenting systems that use a much more common resource--sewage--to mold bricks.

There are several companies making these types of bricks, some of which use 100 percent sewer sludge while others prefer a more refined mixture of sludge and debris from standard ceramic tile factories. The bricks are molded and then fired at extreme temperatures, which we assume smells something like cookies baking in Hell.

The end product is a durable building material often used for outdoor plaza flooring, walkways... oh who are we kidding? The end product is a motherfucking brick of cooked shit. Enjoy.

2 Your Hair (Part 2)

Cleaning up oil spills.

Turn on the news on any given night and you're likely to see depressing images of some animal or another marinating in the aftermath of an oil spill like appetizers at a chocolate fondue party.

1 Foreskins

Anti-aging treatments

Everyday newborn baby boys are circumcised, quickly and neatly altering their plumbing before they are old enough to remember the trauma of having their genitals mutilated with a scalpel. For years, hospitals have simply discarded the leftover bits in a container presumably reserved for the grossest of the gross surgical waste. But not anymore.