No, WEF didn’t say people must drink their pee and eat their faeces to fight climate change

“WEF Declares Humans Must Eat Feces and Drink Urine To Fight Climate Change,” reads a claim circulating on social media in a number of countries, including Uganda and Kenya.

WEF is the World Economic Forum, an independent global nonprofit that describes itself as the “international organisation for public-private cooperation”. It was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, its chairperson.

The claim comes from an article published on the websites Planet Today and the People’s Voice in late July 2023. It is also read out in a YouTube video.

“The WEF is now calling for all of us to eat human feces and drink urine if we want to be one of the lucky few to survive the great depopulation they have planned for humanity,” the article reads.

In the future, it says, “beer will have an extra ingredient – our own urine”, linking to a 2022 report on Yahoo news.

It adds: “And obviously California is fully signed up to the globalist agenda, happily agreeing to drink their own urine to fight so-called climate change.”

It then refers to the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant in Los Angeles, a city in the US state of California. The plant is to be “completely converted into an advanced water purification facility which produces urine that’s clean enough to consume”.

“But the elite will not be happy until every last one of us is engaging in our own personal humiliation ritual, consuming our own excrement – assuming Klaus Schwab decides you are one of the lucky ones to survive the upcoming mass extinction event they keep threatening us with.”

To support its claim that WEF has declared we also have to eat our poo, the article quotes from a 2015 ScienceAlert piece: “The food that will sustain future generations as we colonize our way across space may be none other than our own sh*t, if a new NASA-funded project is successful.”

Nasa is the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration, responsible for space exploration and research.

The claim can also be seen here, here, here, here and here.

But has WEF declared that we must drink our pee and eat our faeces to fight climate change?

Namibia started recycling sewage in 1968

There is no evidence that WEF made any such declaration. A search of the forum’s website returned nothing, and there have been no credible news reports that the organisation said we must drink our urine and eat our faeces.

Our pee is about 95% water and our poo is 55% to 75% water. More than this, sewerage systems need a lot of water to wash our waste away.

The water in these systems is a valuable resource, especially in dry, water-scarce countries. In many African countries, the demand for clean and safe drinking water exceeds supply.

For this reason, water reclamation plants have been recycling sewage and other household wastewater into drinkable water for decades. The Hyperion plant in Los Angeles is just one of thousands.

The Namibian city of Windhoek has been processing its sewage into drinking water since 1968 – three years before WEF was founded. California’s Orange county has been doing it since the mid-1970s.

Processing wastewater is a fairly complex process that requires filtering, settling, osmosis and chemical treatment. 

Watch:

But what comes out the other end is just water and nothing else. It is not urine, as the article claims.

The article on Yahoo news is headlined: Climate change: Could beer made from urine help water shortages? But it is misleading. The report is on an initiative by Singapore’s water agency to make beer using “ultra-clean” processed wastewater – again, just water.

There is no evidence that WEF is behind sewage reclamation efforts.

And the 2015 ScienceAlert article details a US$200,000 grant Nasa gave university researchers in the US “to figure out how to recycle human faeces into synthetic food that could sustain astronauts during extended journeys or on a Martian colony”.

The research is for space travel only, not for general human consumption. And there’s no evidence WEF is in any way involved. 

The claim is false.