Composting Toilets?

To keep up with my previous theme on composting, I've decided to talk about composting toilets after reading this great article in Science magazine (by Gretchen Vogel). Unfortunately, I can't link the full article because it requires the reader (you) to have a membership to Science, but you can read about the summary here. There is a short video about composting toilets as well that you can watch here. The purpose for this post is just awareness. If you already have extensive knowledge of composting toilets, then why haven't you gotten one yet?! I kid, I kid. But, honestly, it sounds pretty gross when you think about it. The first thing that came to my mind was, "Who is going to want to collect their own poop and compost it themselves??" If you're like me, then we probably both share the same "flush it and forget it" mentality that every person with indoor plumbing holds. 

Composting toilets has been around since the 1970's. It now seems to be getting the press that it needs since the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has began the "Reinvent the Toilet Challenge" to research and develop a toilet that can compost human waste for less than 5 cents per user per day. According to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 1.1 billion people don't use a conventional Western toilet and 200 million latrines (communal toilets) are emptied by hand. This is a huge endeavor that will change the quality of life for many people in developing countries.

Images taken from
http://twistedsifter.com/2012/08/bill-gates-reinvent-the-toilet-challeng/

I'm going to put a small disclaimer here: This post is about composting toilets so the mentioning of poop is inevitable. In any case, I should talk about a few disadvantages with our current toilets. 

Our toilets:

• Use clean, drinkable water - this is especially bad for arid countries. 
• Generate lots of wastewater which is expensive to treat - again, this is bad for arid countries and especially for developing ones. Phosphorous is one of the main chemicals that is difficult and expensive to remove from wastewater.
• Combine feces+urine in a lot of water = stanky combination - separating the poop from the pee makes the poop less stinky. Drying the poop is apparently a good way to disinfect it and this way the waste also takes up less space and doesn't need to be treated with any chemicals. 

Some additional facts about composting toilets: 

• Feces, along with our fruit and vegetable peels can be composted together and the end product will look the same, like dirt.
• Urine contains less pathogens making it easier to sterilize when not mixed with feces. 
• When the composting process is done correctly the pile should produce enough heat to kill most of the pathogens and should not emit any odors.  - In one video the compost pile reached up to 128 °F! That's pretty freaking hot and it gets that hot without adding any electricity or chemicals. 

I've seen some videos where they have huge outdoor bins of human feces composting manually (here is one on how to start a bin). This way of composting human feces is not something an average American can or will want to do unless they had some remote cottage in the back country with access to copious amounts of sawdust within arms reach. And even then, I think the yuck factor of collecting and removing one's feces to a compost bin is challenging to the stomach even if there was an opportunity to do so. Luckily it seems that the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge has people composting the feces within the tank so that you're only dealing with the end product. Whew.

Anyway, that comes to mind some challenges about toilets with built in composting tanks in an urban setting. 

• Tanks need to be maintained properly, or else it can become unsanitary quickly...
• Where can you dispose of your composted material in an apartment setting?
• How do we fit a composting toilet into homes that are already fitted with sewage pipes?
• How do we change the psychology of people who have had Western toilets ingrained into their lives? (I can honestly say that I would have second thoughts of emptying my own tank of composted of feces even though I know it's not really poop anymore)
• What do we do with feces that have been contaminated by a sick person? 

These questions are starting to make my stomach turn....  

According to the American Water Works Association roughly 25 gallons of water is flushed per day by the average American. That's 9,125 gallons of water flushed a year. Regardless of whether my stomach turns or not, these are questions that we American's are going to eventually need to deal with.

I barely went into any science on composting toilets, but if you're interested there are some great reads all over the internet like this one and this one from TLC. There are many companies that sell composting toilets, even some DIY composting toilets. A quick Google search will bring up several sites including EZ-loo, Envirolet, and Biolet.

With that I'll leave you with a DIY site with awesome videos on outdoor composting of humanure using the Lovable Lou.

On a side note:

South Korea has now opened the first ever Toilet theme park in Suwon, South Korea. Apparently, the mayor there was very fixated on toilet troubles and was even born in his grandmother's bathroom. Interesting story, a video can be viewed here:

Homemade compost

Homemade Compost

Composting my food scraps has been on my mind ever since I was introduced to it 5 years ago when I first moved to California. Before then I had no idea what composting was or how wasteful it was to toss our vegetable scraps into the trash. For those not familiar with composting, fruits and vegetable scraps should only go into the pile from the kitchen. Anything containing meat, butter, dairy products i.e. any animal products should not go in as this will surly attract any vermin/animals that are looking for a quick meal. Yikes and yuck!

My husband made me my first homemade composter out of a plastic trash can we bought from Ace hardware using directions from this website.  Here are some pics of our first homemade compost bin.

Trash bin from Ace hardware

Poking holes to allow the compost to areate

Lining the bottom with newspaper

Finished setting up

The first time we tried it, we failed. On the bright side, there were several things I learned from this experience:

1. Don't add orange peels. Little did we know orange peels take a long time to compost. There are naturally occurring chemical compounds in the rind that kill bacteria and prevent the peel and the compost from decaying. Not only did we add the peels, we didn't bother to chop them up into smaller pieces either, further distressing our compost pile. 
2. There is a fine balance in the brown:green ratio. After reading several internet websites and composting book (How to build, maintain, and use a compost system by Kelly Smith) there is a delicate balance of carbon:nitrogen ratio in a healthy compost pile. A healthy compost pile consists of 25:1 of carbon to nitrogen, but if you want to guestimate the ratio of 3 carbon to 1 nitrogen works well too. You can and should (if you're interested) read more about that here: C:N ratio.
3. If possible, start the compost during the warmer time of year. Everything degrades faster in warmer temperatures. We started our pile during the chilly month of February, not necessarily prime time and was another cause for the demise of our pile. 
4. Composting a pile - from start to finish - can take more than a month. We gave up on our compost way earlier because of the smell. It was a soupy, slimy mess that, in retrospect, could have been salvaged by adding more cardboard or newspaper. 
5. Don't give up, troubleshoot! I guess I kind of freaked at the stank and the sight of our compost, so we did end up chucking it. Again, in retrospect, the pile could have been salvaged. Here are some troubleshooting tips: troubleshoot1

New compost bin!

This time instead of building a compost I repurposed an old, plastic hamper. It fortunately had a crack in the bottom of it that I could use for drainage purposes. I liked the idea of using the hamper because it is much wider and not as deep as the trash can, which makes it a lot easier to stir the contents using my garden spade. It conveniently has holes in the sides that I use for aeration so that I didn't need to poke holes. And lastly, the hamper would have went out to the landfill to take up space, so reusing it made it a more greener option.

I first lined the bottom and sides with newspapers to give the pile a base. I added some potting soil and then added my food scraps along with more newspaper. I gave it a little water and mixed the contents and voila! Compost! Here is the top view.

We had a random Ikea bookshelf outside that was used to put plants on top. I ended up using the wooden shelves to cover the top of the laundry bin. It's nice and discreet, hopefully no one will complain about the sight of it. 

It's been about four days since I've started the pile and it looked like my fruit scraps were gathering fruit flies. After reading this site here I was able to get the flies under control by mixing in shredded cardboard and burying the fruit scraps deeper into the pile. Luckily it doesn't smell either, a small victory in my mind. I intend to keep this compost till the end so I'll keep you all posted on my results!

Garbage Island

Welcome and thanks for stopping by!

I have been meaning to start a blog about environmental awareness for a while now. Since I’ve finished graduate school I’ve been unemployed, bored, and intellectually stagnant. Now was a good time as any to get in the habit of writing and sharing. So thanks for reading and I hope you can take something away from this. 

So here goes:

Garbage Island

Not too many people are familiar with the details of Garbage Island, a.k.a. Great Pacific Garbage Patch, let alone it’s existence. My understanding was that it was a solid mass of trash the size of Texas in the middle of the ocean. In reality it is more like small random masses of free-floating debris that is spread out with occasional large patches amassed together – not a single solid mass of garbage the size of Texas. One biological oceanographic student from Scripps compared it to “plastic-confetti”. (Read more about it here). And to make matters worse, scientists have also found a garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean! (Atlantic Ocean Garbage Patch).

Source: http://greatpacificgarbagepatch.info/

In any case, it’s disturbing to see the amount of waste humans can generate. We mindlessly discard our empty plastic bottles and other items (purposefully or not) on the beach only to have the tides pick them up and carry them off to sea. Ocean and wind currents gradually catch the garbage in these rotating ocean currents known as ocean gyres, thus creating our garbage patch. Amazingly, about 80% of the trash in the Pacific Garbage Patch is from people on shore (Read more about it here).

Another concern is that plastics undergo photo-degradation, meaning the light from the sun breaks them down into tinier and tinier pieces (Read more about it here). Plastics are special because they are made of polymers, long chains of repeating subunits that are extremely strong when bonded together.

A repeating unit of polypropylene; forms plastics with recycling number 5

Photodegradation of plastics make it easier for our fish and aquatic wildlife to consume them, endangering them and endangering anyone who consumes them. Check out this picture below! How awful must it have been for this albatross and what a painful death it must have suffered after consuming our garbage! You can read more about Charles Moore’s encounter with the garbage patch and how he brought the garbage patch to people’s attention here.

Source: http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ocean/Moore-Trashed-PacificNov03.htm

What can we do about this garbage patch?

It takes about a week to get to the patch by boat, so practicing preventative measures is our best bet. First things first is to be responsible stewards, which of course is much easier said than done, but try we must! Look how cute this kid is in the photo below. Second, we should try to reuse plastics or recycle them as much as possible. Third – spread the word! Let people know how destructive dumping garbage and plastic is to our oceans and their critters. It’s OUR earth; let’s give it a little love.

The best way to stem the growth of the patch is to use less plastic and recycle it more often. Photo courtesy California.gov and Howstufworks.com

* I wanted to give a little update, there is a documentary called 'Plastic Paradise' that is being filmed by Angela Sun. You can check it out here!