Human waste is overwhelming rivers, oceans and ecosystems worldwide, driving pollution, disease and ecological breakdown on a planetary scale.

Every day humans produce more than a megatonne of excrement and then distribute half of it around the Earth without treatment. We are literally poop-bombing the planet, and every human we add contributes to the pile-on.

Little wonder that our rivers, lakes, harbours and marine parks are becoming dangerously unusable, undrinkable, unswimmable and infested with blooms of toxic algae, disease-causing bacteria, parasites and other noxious lifeforms. We are up to our eyes in the brown stuff.

The average person is said to produce 128g of faeces a day, so eight people produce a kilo, and eight billion produce a billion kilos of ordure, a million tonnes a day, or 365 megatonnes every year. The rich, of course, produce a lot more poop than do the poor, as the average rich person swallows 35,000 more meals over their lifetime than does a poor person, besides having larger serves. This tends to emerge in the World Obesity Index.

Treated, partly-treated or untreated, most of our sewage or its nutrient-rich effluent, ends up in the local river, creek or groundwater, and thence flows into the nearest ocean according to a survey by the universities of Utrecht and the United Nations.

Broadly speaking, this is what we do with poo:

High-income countries: ~74 per cent of wastewater is treated

Upper-middle-income countries: ~43 per cent treated

Lower-middle-income countries: ~26 per cent treated

Low-income........

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