Sit, flush and forget, that’s what most of us do, multiple times a day. Composting toilets are the answer.
We use perfectly good, drinkable water to flush our waste — what a waste it truly is! After we flush, we don’t think about all the water that is used/wasted to process the sewage that is created, chemicals are pumped into our water system, the water we DRINK, so that we can do it all over again.
I’m starting to sound pretty green aren’t I?
Honestly that’s not the reason why I stopped using a flush toilet system. For us, it was a case of necessity. We were moving completely off-grid, building a cabin, there is little water, at least little water to waste on flushing a toilet. We had no well, no septic system, no flush toilets. We needed a good way to deal with our toilet waste so I started researching how to eliminate our eliminations.
That’s when I found Joseph Jenkins and Humanure. Well, first I learned about composting toilets. These are usually all self contained units, looking like uber toilets, they tend to come with an uber price tag too.
How they work is they contain your waste within the unit, you add cover material, usually sawdust or something like that. Many of them have heaters, vents and fans to help dry out the waste. After a period of time, you empty the container and finish composting outside if need be. The biggest problem with these is the price tag, usually thousands of dollars, plus these tend to be rather large, bulky units.
It turns out that Joseph Jenkins figured out a very simple way of composting bodily waste using little more than a 5 gallon bucket, a toilet seat/lid and some organic cover material. You split the composting into two parts, with the majority of it going on outside in a compost pile instead of inside the unit. The system is so simple, nearly fool proof, I quickly decided it was the right way to go for us.
This is also a common question I get about living off-grid, how and where do I go to the bathroom? It’s quite simple once you know about composting and sawdust toilets. We have been using this system since Dec 07, we have tweaked the system a couple of times, other than that it has worked like a charm for us. The main thing we have changed is the outside portion. We started out using a wire enclosure to hold the compost pile, we are not on level ground and once the compost pile was as tall as I am, the whole thing began to tilt, we were afraid it would topple over and we did not want to have to deal with that kind of mess.
Bob created a 2 barrel system to hold and compost our humanure. This system composts fast, there is little to no smell, the only time it has any odor is when we are dumping the bucket into the first barrel. Once the door is closed, no more smell. The bottom composter has no smell, well I take that back, it does have a pleasant, humus, dirt smell, nothing like what originally went in.
Here is a video about that:
Joseph Jenkins has been kind enough to shoot videos of his system and place them on YouTube, you can view them here, there are 14 videos, they will play one after the next:
You can get Joseph Jenkins Humanure book here:
The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Third Edition
This contains everything you ever wanted to know about sawdust toilets, including instructions how to build one yourself. You don’t need to live off-grid like I do to use a sawdust toilet, many people have and use sawdust toilets along side their flush toilets. I read about one lady who had a flush toilet and a sawdust toilet in her bathroom. She placed instructions on the door, stating that you could either use the pure drinking water wasting toilet, or you could use the Earth friendly, no water wasting sawdust toilet. She said that most people opted to use the sawdust toilet.
Read my other articles about my off-grid life here
https://off-grid.net/section/wretha/