How to deal with... "waste"

[noobiechickenlady]

We talk a lot about eating more healthy & sustainably. Can we talk a little about the other end of the digestive track? Namely, the poop

I got in the book Humanure Handbook this Friday and I've already read most of it. The authors have been composting excrement for many years in a compost pile. They call theirs Gomer
Here's a link to the book as a download.

So, lets talk

I'm seriously thinking of removing the toilet in the master bath (it's leaking anyways) & replacing it with a cabinet sawdust toilet. Collect the contents in a compost pile, let it age a year or more after the last "live" material enters and use it at least on fruit trees.
This would require hay/straw for a "sponge" bottom, aeration & cover of the pile, sawdust for covering the contents of the toilet & a compost bin. Plus small amounts of water for cleaning the toilet "tank". A bucket, for instance.

Do you use an outhouse, composting, chemical, standard or water saver toilet?

What are the benefits of the method you use? Downsides?

 

[farmerlor]

There's a place I'm not gonna go. I'm old and we actually had a house that had an outhouse. My great-grandfather refused to install an indoor toilet because he said only pigs sh&t where they lived. But that's beside the point. If the SHTF (no pun intended) I guess I could live with an outhouse but as long as there's still electricity and running water and a septic tank that someone else can come pump out once in awhile, that's my concession to not being self-sufficient.

 

[okiegirl1]

yep, I'm with Farmerlor.

There are still too many other things to get done for teh SS lifestyle before I want to deal with people-poop.

Chicken, rabbit & goat poop, I'm good, but people.... not so much.

 

[me&thegals]

I think I could do it, but DH would NEVER go for it and his family would definitely disown us .

We have a water-saver toilet, which stinks. I mean, it actually uses more water because many times you need to flush twice. But, maybe that's because we only flush about once every 12 times and it's getting overloaded.

 

[noobiechickenlady]

Just a smart-butt question, but, do you have kids? Change any diapers? Weeeellllll....

What I am thinking about this is multi-fold.
#1, We flush our poop with clean drinking water. WTH? I mean really!
#2, The sewage treatment centers don't "dispose" of the stuff, they process the heck out of it & put it in landfills or back into the water stream. Where it can still contain prescription drugs & diseases. And can actually contribute to resistant strains of pathogens.
#3, It's humbling, dealing with your own poop.
#4, the best looking berry bushes & fruit trees I have ever seen were grown with humanure. Just outside Little Rock, AR on a farm run by a friend of mine.
#5, The sawdust toilets didn't smell. At all. Well, they smelled like sawdust, not poop.
#6. Landfills leak, polluting the water supply
#7. Outhouses can leak, polluting the water supply

Not trying (very hard) to convince anyone else, just giving my reasons.

Aha! One semi-positive. Thanks M&TG, I don't feel so alone anymore

 

[me&thegals]

I read a lot about it online a while back. The couple who did it lived in a desert area and managed to use very little water. They built a nice-looking wooden "surround" and it really looked pretty nice! I think it could be done very well and nonaromatically.

 

[farmerlor]

I read an article about it Mother Earth news. Very compelling and earth friendly. Still not gonna do it. I should put this in that thread about the one luxury I have to have....flushing toilets.

 

[okiegirl1]

Just a smart-butt question, but, do you have kids? Change any diapers? Weeeellllll....

yep, didn't really bother me, but we have company all the time. I just don't want to deal with everyone's poop that comes to my house.
when dd was small, I used disposable diapers and never even thought about it. Now, if I were to have another, it'd be cloth. I'm just now starting to become aware of all the damage done. I can't do everything SS, but I'm trying. One step at a time.

 

[Wifezilla]

I did a research paper on composting toilets back in college. It can be done, but I don't need to right now, so I wont. It is enough for me cleaning up after the animal critters...don't want to have to worry about the people critters too!

 

[sylvie]

I have had a composting toilet since 1991. It isn't in the house, here we have a conventional toilet. I'd move that composter inside in a heartbeat and may get that done in Spring.
This is the best system I have ever seen! I was going to start a thread on it but never got around to it.

Start at beginning, I guess.
We bought a vacation cabin that had a chemical toilet. Ineffective, hard to dispose of waste and I, to this day, cannot stomach the smell of the chemical.
Bought a Sunmar Composting Toilet and built a new outhouse for it. The chemical smell in the old one was embedded in the walls and woodwork. To quote FarmerChick: "ugh!"! I power sprayed the walls, left the door open for a month to air. No luck.

The compost toilet works absolutely fantastically. We originally used the bales of peat moss, but switched several years ago to shredded leaves(ala lawnmower)which work just as well! I see no reason that sawdust wouldn't be as effective. One bale of peat lasted us two for a year, so not bad for $6.50. Leaves are replenishable, whereas peat isn't from what I've read.

When we were remodeling the bath in the home we were living in full time then, we used a bucket with the peat moss, emptied daily over to the compost toilet. No smell, whatsoever, a big plus. We had built a portable surround for the bucket, BTW.

The compost toilet is simple to empty-ours has a drum that uses a
handle to turn. It is all composted and done in a month or so depending on the weather. My pine trees are enormous that received that compost. Those that didn't are 1/20th the size, so it is an excellent fertilizer. My family wouldn't entertain the idea of eating anything fertilized with its compost so had to respect that.

We will use it as a second toilet. I know that if you have one SOME zoning/health departments cut you slack on septic size installation requirements. I also know not all communities allow them. Maybe that's changing, as it should.

It was sure nice having it when power is out, water scarce from drought. They aren't cheap, but I think your plan sounds good.
I'd use the finest sawdust for odor control, as opposed to, say, woodchips used for a horse stall