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: