Publication: “Schöne Scheiße!” (Hoy Shit!) by Ursula Kosser.
Every day, we flush a valuable raw material down the toilet with precious drinking water—and in doing so, we are contributing to the global ecological crisis. In her new book “Schöne Scheiße!”, Ursula Kosser shows why a different approach to feces can be crucial for a sustainable future.
Every year, humans produce around 580 million tons of feces worldwide – rich in nutrients and energy. But most of this resource remains unused. Instead, modern societies struggle at great expense to dispose of feces as waste as odorlessly as possible.
In “Holy Shit! How our feces can be the resource of the future” (publication date: March 5, 2026), Ursula Kosser questions why human and animal excrement are treated as a pure disposal problem, even though they could be used as fertilizer, raw material, energy source, building material, or even in medicine. If excrement were consistently reintegrated into material cycles, it would be possible to tap into a previously wasted potential for climate, soil, and resource protection. Shit could thus become pure gold in an economic sense as well.
The necessary technologies—from dry separation toilets to biogas plants—already exist. However, there is currently a lack of social acceptance and political will to use or expand them. “We treat shit as a taboo subject, even though it can be so essential for our future,” says Kosser. With her book, she therefore rehabilitates the world’s feces and promotes more circular thinking and less disgust.
Ursula Kosser: “Schöne Scheiße! Wie unsere Fäkalien die Ressource der Zukunft sein können” (Holy Shit! How our feces can be the resource of the future); 160 pages, paperback, ISBN 978-3-98726-522-8, print €20.00 / €20.60 (AT), ePub €15.99 / €16.99 (AT)
The author
Ursula Kosser studied Protestant theology and history and is the author of several non-fiction books. As a political journalist, Kosser reported for many years from the Bonn office of the news magazine DER SPIEGEL. For around twenty years, she worked as a television journalist at RTL in Bonn and Munich, both in front of and behind the camera, most recently as editor-in-chief. In 2023, she published “Die Wunderwelt der Pfützen” (The Wonderful World of Puddles) with Susanne Bergius, published by oekom verlag.
