Time to compost your wee and your poo

I must admit, I hadn't expected such an overwhelming response to my previous post to the effect that dual-flush toilets (or specifically drop-valve dual-flush toilets) are hopeless.

Or, since champions of the drop-valve have shown themselves to be fierce in its defence, I should say more precisely that one in five of the things is hopeless (that being the proportion permitted by law, amazingly, to leak from the moment you buy them).

As it happens, I don't pin all my hopes on siphon-based loos. In fact, I've moved rapidly towards the conclusion that we must prepare for a future in which composting toilets become mainstream.

In this, I've been encouraged by the glimpse of a composting loo on the allotment beside my own, when the door was briefly left ajar. How come I'd not seen it before? Well, I daresay the owners prefer to keep quiet about their facility, lest they come across the likes of the reader of my last toilet-related post who criticised another reader as 'disgusing' after she suggested that we need not always flush after doing a wee.

The recently departed mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, came in for similar abuse a couple of years ago when he advised Londoners to preserve precious water supplies by letting it mellow when it's yellow (wee) and only flushing it down when it's brown (you don't need me to explain this bit).

Now, if you haven't thought deeply about this topic before, you may possibly share the sense of disgust. But champions of composting toilets would argue that the disgust works both ways: as the great Joseph Jenkins, author of the internationally bestselling Humanure Handbook puts it, we have developed into the only species in the world that deliberately sh*ts into our drinking water.

I became aware of the extreme fragility of contemporary cloacal arrangements when travelling round Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire last summer after those parts were hit by flooding. I'm not talking here about the ghastliness of other people's sewage washing into your home - though that is certainly an issue. No, I'm thinking of the occasion when I asked to use somebody's loo and didn't think till too late that I'd need to use their precious bucketloads of water to flush after I'd finished. Talk about embarrassing!

It would have been so much easier if somebody had thought to set up emergency composting loos (like these ones, used at music festivals) till water supplies were restored (a process that took many days).

Looking ahead to the possibility of a water shortage in London, I have already prepared to set up at short notice a composting toilet for my own family's use. In doing this, I've been helped by reading the Humanure Handbook, but also by watching the film (above) directed by Bafta-winning director Nick Fenton with words by the fantastically inspiring permaculture practitioner Graham Burnett, of Spiralseed.

If neighbours wish to make use of my improvised facility, when the water runs out, they will be welcome, because the composted material provides unequalled natural fertiliser. In the Korean war, American GIs could never understand why Koreans so eagerly invited them to make use of their primitive loos: having read this far, you will have grasped the essentially selfish motive.

Comments

[Tom]

Recycling human waste for manure can be achieved at a municipal level as well. My hometown of Austin, Texas has been doing this for almost 20 years and selling it branded 'dillo dirt': http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/water/dillo.htm

It's a bit smelly when it's freshly spread though!

[Graham Burnett]

Nice one! Just a small correction on the Youtube film though - this isnt the film Nick Fenton made but is just a short slide show by myself covering some of the basics... Nick's film is much funnier!!