Composting toilets: Ready for Prime Time?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 09.22.07
TreeHugger has floated the idea of composting toilets for houses before; the consensus among commenters was "Composting toilets are NEVER going to make it into the main stream market. Debating it is silly." Or is it? Ontario Green Party candidate Shane Jolley says it's time to allow builders to take toilets in new subdivisions off the pipe.
"People have an aversion to dealing with our own waste, but this type of toilet uses far less water and makes far fewer demands on our resources. There's work to be done educating people about how compost toilets work and the benefits, but there should be financial incentives and effort made to implement this concept."
The Star continues: For generations, we've spent vaults of money to purify and pump water to our homes. Then we foul it and pump the results to sewage plants, to spend more making it clean enough – we hope – to dump into our lakes and rivers.
The composting toilet's mechanics are simple: the waste, via gravity, goes into a tank where, mixed with wood chips, it composts. The result is fertilizer, though the process requires time and a ventilation system – basically a fan – for odours.
In parts of the planet where drinking water is in short supply, the main selling point of composting toilets will likely be the huge amount of H2O that can be saved. But will builders in Canada find it worthwhile to take the human waste-disposal process off-grid?
"We pay up to $8,000 per house in levies for sewage," says Craig Marshall of Marshall Homes. "If we could save half of this money and save water too, the public might be prepared to go along with it.
"There's a way to go in terms of public acceptance. Now, the first thing people want when they have, say, a cottage, is a flush toilet. A toilet that doesn't flush and use water isn't an easy sell."
Even big developers are not laughing about it, although they are not yet selling them.
"The idea of consumers taking the compost down 30 floors doesn't seem realistic," says Andrew Pride of Minto Developments. "We are looking at ways that rainwater could be used for toilets, rather than compost-oriented solutions." ::The Star
The current system of installing huge concrete pipes to carry our crap into someone else's backyard may be convenient but isn't sustainable. It is time to look seriously at the alternatives, like Shane is. ::Shane Jolley
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We've tried a variety of composting toilets over the past ten years- In personal settings, community settings, and for various farms we've worked on. The classic SunMar drum toilet has just never worked all that well. And we've spent countless phone calls with the companies for help and still not that great of results. And this is coming from farmers who build compost piles all the time.
The idea is great, it looks like the next step in composting toilet design is what it's going to take to make it a viable mainstream option. But hey if we can make LED's mainstream why not composting toilets.
Great post Lloyd. A recent article I ran on Celsias really brought this topic home for me. As water worries are increasing worldwide, it just seems so absurd that we take a great deal of the little precious clean water we have, turn it into a putrid goo, then send it out into yet more clean water. And, although many western cities treat their sewerage (at great cost energy-wise, and with varying degrees of success, as you've intimated), large parts of the world follow our centralised system, right up until the part where it gets expensive - i.e. they skip the treatment part.
In natural terrestrial systems waste always ends up back in the soil. It only makes sense. Composting toilets need to become the next big thing in household fashion accessories.
I live in grey county ...AND i'm going ahead with making a grey water system and making my own compost toilet (we can't afford to buy one right now). It's so frustrating to know composting is a better system yet not accepted form of disposing our waste... Not too mention i'll save like 8000.00 bucks not getting a CEMENT 6000 LBS septic tank sytem and that is money i need to put back into our farm.
"The idea of consumers taking the compost down 30 floors doesn't seem realistic," ...as the phrase goes ..another persons garbage is anothers treasure. I would love to get my hands on some FREE compost ! whos to say someone wouldn't buy that compost!
Thanks for the great article! When my husband first said that he wanted to put composting toilets in our house I made the "ewww how disgusting!" face. But, after researching the environmental and economic reasons (not to mention all that nirtogen rich compost) I am looking forward to educating others about the benefits of composting toilets with our own home as an example!
As far as I am concerned, the future of composting toilets is in a whole house system. The best example I have found of this, is the winner of the CMHC's Healthy House Competition. You can find all the details on the creators website below.
http://healthyhousesystem.com/
They also have a whitepaper on the problems and solutions to their water and waste system for the project. A very interesting read!
http://mha-net.org/msb/html/papers-n/palo01/wastewa.htm
I am about to build an outbuilding. The idea of a composting toilet (and a waterless urinal) both sound great to me. Add a rainwater catchment type system going directly through a whole house water filter and gravity feeding into the sink faucet. Throw in a solar waterheating wand to keep the water tank from freezing in cold weather and it should work. The cost should even be competitive with a perk test, septic system and current standard practice fixtures.
We are considering adding a $10,000 composting toilet (a Phoenix - http://www.compostingtoilet.com/) to a new home that we are building in the middle of the city (Edmonton, Alberta).
I am worried about flies. I have heard that fruit flies can be a problem. Having such a large amount of organic matter indoors at room temperature is worrisome.
Can anyone comment on the experience of living with a composting toilet?
As far as I know fruit flies are only a problem if you add kitchen scraps to the system. They lay eggs in vegetable material and as long as you separately compost your food waste you shouldn't have an issue.
We have been using an ENVIROLET composting toilet as our only "jon" for a few years now. The process is sound and basically everything has been as advertised other than the product itself. ENVIROLET has been very uncommunicative with us. We use a combination of sphagnum and sawdust. The break down is complete and smell free, we use it on plants other than vegetables only to avoid any mishap. The toilet system is smell & fly free in all conditions other than dead calm. The issue is, waste including the TP and sphagnum mix gets pretty heavy fast. A lot heavier than we had ever thought. The instructions state to agitate regularly. That is more work than it sounds particularly if a couple days have gone by without agitating. The mechanism gets stuck and it takes quite a bit of manipulation. In the long run we have settled on manual raking once a week. It is sort of nasty and not a pleasant task. Of course this will never fly if we want to sell the house. It is a simple process that needs to be kept simple. Not too many gadgets or mechanical things but heavy duty as playing in a "septic tank" either in maintenance or repairs, is not for the light of heart. If my husband were not able to take care of this, well there are no listings in the yellow pages for poo raker, so I guess we would have to look into a different type or go back to a conventional toilet.
Thanks for your articles.
Umm... what do you dry-clean it with if you get the squits and spray all over the place?
I've been researching this topic & admit that at first, I thought a composting toilet was like an attached outhouse with a really deep hole in the ground for poo. I'm afraid that's probably what most people think of when approached with this idea.
Fortunately for them, I've created a nice comparison of composting systems to septic tanks here & it was good enough to change my husband's mind, which isn't an easy thing to do.
We're moving up to the Bangor, ME area soon & will be building our dream green cob & straw bale home, complete with composting toilets (maintained by me) & a gray water recycling system for showers, sinks, & the washing machine. We just have to make sure they're allowed before buying our land. I'm currently researching that.
I'm really glad to see more people in positions of power, like our Canadian friend here, promoting composting toilets. We're pioneering here, & can use all the help we can get to educate & spread the word.
Thanks, TreeHugger for addressing this:)
Skip the expensive toilets. A 5 gal. bucket, some wood chips and a copy of "The Humanure Handbook" works nicely.