086 Dry toilets, humanure, and closing the sewage loop

From: starstuffharvestingstarlight [e-mail] Date: 2010-07-14 22:18:37 Title: Dry toilets, humanure, and closing the sewage loop

at SPCC city sewage works. but the excess smell, the need for buckets to flush, and personal ecological concerns, led us to look for a better alternative. i would be lying if i said it was our main goal. necessity, again, is the mother of invention.

images from the humanure handbook

humans produce a lot of shit. i think that besides talking and sitting around doing nothing, it's probably one of the things we do the most. but using city sewage implies, in our case, that a lot of the sewage will end up in the ocean, as pollution, in an open loop.

in order to close this loop and make it sustainable, instead of flushing a toilet, one can compost all waste (see image above). so, and thanks to some input by one of our guests, Tori, we started building dry toilets. we now have three dry toilets, and will continue to do so.

we started with an old plastic bucket, a wood board and an old toilet seat.

we cut a hole in the wood board, attached the seat, and made a frame out of pallets. all the wood was found on the streets. the frame was designed to fit the building toilet room perfectly. then, under the frame, we put the bucket. it's not that hard, really, and it looks great. this one is on the chill out level now:

so this is the structure. the shit and pee must be covered with some kind of dust/matter to prevent smell and certain bacteria growth. saw dust, dry grass trimmings, or even shredded paper work good enough.

and what about the waste? human shit is dangerous if not taken care of. you can get all kinds of fucked up diseases from it. in order to prevent this, one way is to have a hot composting pile (which we do). a hot composting pile needs to be hot enough to "bake" the bacteria and the shit (around 60ºC). in our case, we only have a pile outside, but since it's in the sun and it's summer, it's been degrading gracefully into good compost. it needs a lot of time to stabilize, maybe 6 months, before we can use it. we are planning on getting a big black composter so we can keep the animals away from our shit, since that's also a vector for infection (human shits - bacteria grows - animal eats shit - animal spreads it to human).

our dry toilets don't smell, and if the drunks don't miss the hole too much (which they do, too much), they are much cleaner. this is another loop we successfully closed. a smaller footprint for a cleaner planet.