Lively communities for trade emerged in the Middle Ages and populations grew dense. This created opportunities as well as problems.
One of those worries was sanitation, specifically the treatment of human and animal waste.
A historian and professor at the University of Stavanger, Dolly Jørgensen, has researched waste disposal in Scandinavian and Northern European Medieval cities. She points out that in a medieval city with a population of 10,000, people typically produced 900,000 litres of excrement and nearly three million litres of urine annually. This was before such cities had underground sewage systems.
Added to that were the copious amounts of dung from livestock kept in the cities, from pigs, horses, cows and poultry.
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