Composting toilets

Regenerative & Transitional Technology Transition Tech
#1

Okay, so a composting toilet isn’t necessarily transition tech, as one can easily be made from ceramic or something, but this seemed like the best area.

A composting toilet is basically just a bucket or other container with a comfortable seat on it. When you piss or shit, instead of flushing you throw something on top, like grass, newspaper, lawn clippings, etc. Something biodegradable. These layers of dry compost act as a cap to the gross smells, and also allow the composting of your waste to begin. Then every once in awhile, you empty the whole stinking mess into your compost heap.

I think this is an idea worth remembering for some of us, since it might allow us to be slightly more sedentary by increasing garden yields, and would also allow us the ability to not have to go run a decent distance from camp just to take a dump. I don’t look forward to that in New England winters.

#2

I would like to add moss and leaves to that list…

#3

A cycle I was thinking of:

  1. Human waste into the compost pile. The heat from the compost pile can be used to warm bath water.

  2. The decomposed compost can be used to grow plants. Between the food forests and the fields there is a forty foot border of comfrey (the dense foliage prevents plants from the field from getting into the food forest uninvited). The comfrey is cut down in strips and the compost raked into place. Comfrey is fast growing and can be cut down two or three times a year.

  3. The leaves from the Comfrey mulch in place when spread into the food forest, feeding the plants.

  4. the plants and eaten and human waste is created, thereby closing the cycle.

Cross contamination is a practical impossibility. The composting process will destroy almost all of the bacteria etc in the human waste. Then the nutrients go through the comfrey plant before composting again and going through another plant before being eaten.

  • Benjamin Shender
#4

The way we do our outhouse works pretty good for us.
We have very rocky ground here, tough digging. I built our outhouse above ground with two compartments side by side.
We only use one at a time and the other is covered. When one side is full we move the seat over to the other compartment and put the lid on the full one.
Each compartment takes about two years to fill up. So by the time the second one is full the first one has sat for two years. I have a side door on each compartment so I can shovel them out. The two year old shite just looks like dirt. doesn’t stink.

So we just keep moving the seat back and forth every two years. and the full compartment sits for two before it has to get shoveled out.

We put wood ash from our stove on after each use to keep smell and flies away.