Peak Manure

Gwynne Dyer looks at peak oil projections, and notes:

London in the 1890s had 11,000 horse-drawn taxis and several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses a day.

Add all the private carriages and the tens of thousands of horse-drawn carts, wagons and drays delivering goods, and there were at least 100,000 horses on the streets of London every day – each producing an average of 10kg   of manure. Two thousand tonnes of manure a day. There were flies everywhere, and if you didn’t shovel the manure up quickly, it dried up and blew into your eyes, your hair, your nose, your clothes.

As the cities grew, even more horses were needed and the problem grew steadily worse.

One writer in the Times in 1894 estimated that in 50 years the streets of London would be buried under 3m of manure.

The first peak manure projection 🙂