Building and Using the Compost Toilet
This mouldering compost toilet is a modest experiment in how to live more nonviolently on this earth.
Video short on compost toilet
Leaving less of a footprint on the earth
Schematic drawing of our compost toilet
Why we are using a compost toilet...
Most toilets use about three gallons of water per flush. (water use questionnaire)
In the US, toilets account for almost 30% of all indoor water use, more than any other fixture or appliance.
More than 4.8 billion gallons of water are flushed down toilets each day .(more)
Water is essential to all aspects of life, yet 99 percent of water on Earth is unsafe or unavailable to drink.
About 1.2 billion people globally lack safe water to consume and 2.6 billion do not have access to adequate sanitation.
Just one flush of a toilet in the West uses more water than most
Africans have to perform an entire day's washing, cleaning, cooking and drinking. (more)
and, the urine makes good nitrogen fertilizer
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Mike Miles came from the Anatoth Catholic Worker Farm to help us build the compost toilet. We already had a concrete floor and side, so we built two compartments out of cinder blocks to hold the humanure. This compost toilet requires no electricity and no water. (February 2006) |
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Painting the cinderblocks with white waterproof cement... |
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Then, building the floor of the compost toilet. |
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Building the walls. Inside, a long wooden bench with two seats on it. We'll alternate use of the seats, letting the humanure in one compartment molder while we use the next compartment. |
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Dark green oil based paint (or black) can be used inside the bins.... You can see at the botton the cinder block holes. These are the holes where air comes in, goes through plastic drain pipes, through a layer of straw, and then through the humanure to dry it out. |
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The urine collection tank will placed outside. The seat of the toilet is designed so that the urine is separated and taken by a tube to a tank that is outside.The urine gets mixed 1:3 with water, and is used on trees or the garden before planting. |
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Brendan Walsh, from Viva House Catholic Worker, hears how the air flow works. "The air goes in the bottom, and up the black vent to the top of the roof, taking odors and moisture with it." |
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17 months later, Dr. Joe Morton shovels the humanure out of the bin into the wheelbarrow. There were 11 wheelbarrow loads. The duff is a mixture of humanure, wood chips and toilet paper (The TP didn't fully dissolve). We put the humanure around trees and in a pile in the woods to use at a later time. We cleaned the straw and humanure out, washed the drain pipes, and placed them again on the bottom, put straw over them, and closed up the front. The far compartment is closed up, and now we can use this empty compartment.
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We do have flush toilets, too, and we take showers, water the garden, wash our clothes.
This mouldering compost toilet is an experiment in how to live more nonviolently on this earth.
We used The Humanure Handbook, A Guide to Composting Human Manure by J.C. Jenkins
for inspiration and help.