GreenBuild: I Have Seen the Future and it Flushes
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 11.25.08
For a long time this TreeHugger has been promoting the idea of residential composting toilets, saying that " If we are truly going to develop a zero waste society and protect our water resources, we are going to have to start thinking about dealing with all of our wastes and not keep flushing some of them down the pipe."
Commenters scoffed, suggesting "Composting toilets are NEVER going to make it into the main stream market. Debating it is silly." and "No one will want this inside their house. I know this, because I still have a few teeth in my head and a few friends in town."
Well, I suggest that the scoffers look at the picture above because this is the future and it works. Clivus Multrum is delivering a toilet that is as acceptable as a conventional water flush toilet, together with a support and service system that makes it almost as carefree.
The key point is that it is not just a toilet; that is just the front end. The back end is a big composter built into your basement and a service system where the dealer inspects your system on a regular basis and cleans it out when necessary, which could be as rarely as once a year. If it is designed into your house with exterior access, you may not even know they came.
office building with composting toilets
There is a cost to this, but how much of the cost of your house went into the installation of the servicing, the sewers? How much of your taxes are going to maintain the sewage treatment plant? What is happening at the sewage treatment plant, when you externalize your waste? We are going to have to learn to live with these compromises, to manage gray water systems and rainwater collection systems; this just a small step further.
Composting Toilet at Bronx Zoo
I have used almost every kind of composting toilet, and until now there isn't one that I would put into a house. This one could go anywhere. Clivus Multrum
TreeHugger on Composting Toilets
Thinking about Crap: Should Houses Have Composting Toilets?
Farewell to "Flush and Forget"
Vancouver Office Building Goes "Off-Pipe"
Composting toilets: Ready for Prime Time?
Waste Not, Want Not: The Future of Toilets
More on Clivus Multrum
Clivus Multrum at the Bronx Zoo :
Foam Flush Toilets :
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As an employee at a waste water treatment plant, this concept intrigues me. There is a lot of money wrapped up in our current sanitation system, but I don't see how having a truck drive around town and pumping sewage out of basements is going to be any better finacially or environmentally. For one thing, the truck is probably going to be running on diesel and making additional CO2. Secondly, where is the truck going to take the waste? I can't speak about every other municipality, but here the "honey trucks" that pump out septic tanks take the waste guess where. The waste water treatment plant.
To answer your question, "What is happening at the sewage treatment plant, when you externalize your waste?"
The waste comes into the plant. First inorganic objects (like tampons and condoms) are filtered out. The water is purified and put into the river. The sludge is digested and the methane is captured. The sludge is then sent to a variety of other applications including farm application, composting (which ends up in the mulch you spread in your flower garden), and some of it is even incinerated (using the methane previously harvested) and spread on baseball diamonds.
If a composting toilet can do all of that, at a lower cost, greener, I'm interested.
So what are they doing with the waste when they service the system?
i agree 100%. i think that repeatedly flushing our waste into the unknown contributes to the throw-away consciousness. we need composting toilets for our collective state of mind as well as practical reasons. it's a no-brainer, just like green burials.
First off let me say I've used several composting toilets, and I am in favor of them. The problem with making them widespread is water though. Good composting toilets have low amounts of liquids, so that the solids can actually do their work. So unless a household was able to divert their graywater (from sinks, showers, dishwashers, clothes washers, etc) the house would still need a septic tank or septic lines to carry it to the treatment plant. It's not hard to retrofit a composting toilet into a house, but to retrofit the entire plumbing system would be difficult. Maybe some green developer could work on making a neighborhood of typical-looking homes that manage all the water and digest all the waste (or at least can be picked up and used elsewhere). The graywater rules are hard to get around in most places though. Anyway, long live the biolets out there!
Kudos to these guys... As soon as I have some extra money I`m putting one of these in my house.
There's no truck that is pumping out sewage. In fact there is no sewage.
Sewage is the mix of water, waste and chemicals that one finds in a sewer or treatment plant. Compost toilets contain only human waste and toilet paper which, over time, reduce as liquids are separated out and compost into a valuable soil amendment. The liquids are separated to a tank where they can be used on-site as a fertilizer.
In some situations local authorities do not allow the use of the end products so they are trucked off to waste treatment plants. This is sub-optimal but in those cases at least valuable drinking water has not been used to remove the waste. This is the case at the Bronx Zoo in NYC where they save about a million gallons of water each year.
i am pretty sure that the compost that comes out of these things is used as fertilizer. I think its a great idea and while it may not be the solution for all areas, its great for some places with delicate groundwater systems. plus that toilet just looks cool.
Clivus can flush my sludge anytime!