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Ecology & Sustainability
Green Projects – Composting Toilets
"It is more important to tell the simple, blunt truth than it is to say things that sound good."
John Heider
Toilets are water wasting. It has only been in the last two hundred years that water has been used for flushing. 1/3 of water wasted goes down the ‘S’ bend. That works out at two baths worth of water per day for the average family. Sewage treatments then pump the effluent into waterways and the ocean, polluting marine environments. Septic tanks are also unreliable. Absorption trenches become clogged flowing effluent into the garden or the under ground water streams that may end up in the rivers.
As usual, from little things, big things grow. It is now possible in some countries under the Health Regulation Act to build a Composting Toilet in the house. (The National Parks in Australia are the largest single user of composting toilet systems in Australia). Compost toilets are a balance between the ancient methods of the countryside and the hygiene requirements of modern society. Their purpose is to make human manure innocuous without using water to flush it away.
There are various different models of composting around the globe, from simple sawdust pits to deluxe models where you don’t actually smell or see the manure until it has converted to humus and is ready for the garden.
Composting toilets at Boom
Contrary to popular belief, composting toilets are no longer pits in the ground, and many
can be installed indoors in the bathroom like normal toilets. The composting toilets used at the BOOM Festival are classified as Dry Composting Toilets.
How they work:
• You deposit your manure or pee and add a handful of sawdust. The adding of sawdust (carbon) aids in the composting process along with literally covering the odors.
• Close the toilet lid! The lid must be left closed all the time to keep the heat in the toilet also flies out!
Behind the scenes:
• The manure falls into a chamber. The chamber is obviously closed to exclude rodents and flies. By providing an enclosed environment the natural process of aerobic decomposition will commence.
• The chamber is painted black on the outside, being the colour that absorbs heat. The chamber heats allowing the composting process to further.
• As the chamber heats, and the manure composts, heat will be generated and rise. The vented chamber extracts any odor generated from the pile. So you don’t smell a thing, if you keep the toilet lid closed!
Note: Most female hygiene products and nappies are tainted with dyes or plastic. They should not be thrown into any toilet, as they will not compost.
Pathogens
There are many pathogen-killing processes that occur in composting human manure on its way to becoming soil. Joseph Jenkins of “The Humanure Handbook” has many years of research under his belt! He writes that TIME is a major factor since human pathogens die within a few months, once outside the body. There are some other pathogens that take longer to die outside the human body, so we keep the pile in the chamber for at least six months before worms are added to the compost. High TEMPERATURE is the other method to killing these organisms. By keeping the pile at 55 degrees Celsius for 3 days (which is not difficult in the Idanha-a-Nova), human pathogens will die.
The ethics behind composting toilets is that the soils of the world are either being worn out and left in ruins, or are being slowly poisoned. The restoration and maintenance of soil fertility has become a universal problem. By collecting human manure in a festival of over 20,000 people we can create compost that can be added for soil fertility.
DID YOU KNOW?
For forty centuries countries like Japan and China have worked the soil for crops to feed millions of people. Many westerners have been puzzled on how they have achieved to feed the people and retain the fertility of the soil. The secret was readily shared - Night Soil. Manure of all kinds was religiously saved in Japan and China by recycling the natural resources discarded by their bodies back into the soil. In Shanghai 1908, the International Concession of the city sold the privilege of entering residences and public places in the early hours of the morning to remove the night soil to a Chinese contractor. The contractor paid $31,000 gold for 78,000 tones of human and animal manure.
Faeces and urine are not seen as waste in countries of Africa, Asia, Australia and some of the European countries. They see the natural, organic refuse discarded by our bodies after completing the digestive processes as a valuable resource. Human manure can and is changed into humus, rich compost that is then placed back into the soil. In 1954, the World Health Organization Expert Committee recognized the widespread use, in many parts of the world, of human manure being used as a fertiliser.
More detailed information is available on composting toilets and human manure in the excellent book from Joseph Jenkins, "The Humanure Handbook". A guide to composting human manure.