During my short stint in grad school, I wrote a paper about the possibilities for wide scale use of composting toilets to replace aging sewage systems and combat drought. My professor hated it. I think she thought I was trying to mock her class or something! I wasn't though. I thought it was a good idea, and I still do. Here is the condensed, internet-friendly version of the article:
FUTURE TOILETS
In 1596, the first toilet, called the Ajax, was invented in England. The Queen used the device, but the invention and its inventor were widely ridiculed.
In the urban centers of the Middle Ages, citizens defecated in a clay pot and hurled it out the window into the street. Not surprisingly, medieval cities were cesspools for the spread of cholera and plagues. Instead of cleaning up the literal heaps of crap in the streets, the spread of disease was blamed on Jews and witches.
In the Roman Empire, a water-based pipe plumbing system had previously grown up around the public baths. But early Christian Europe rejected Roman pagan culture, and the rejection included plumbing. Plumbing was stained with sin by its association with the baths, which Christians associated with debauchery and orgies. Things started to change with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The Renaissance brought Greek and Roman ideas back into fashion and made them more acceptable. During The Enlightenment, the idea that scientific development could solve social problems took root. Still, flush toilets and plumbing seemed like a ridiculous idea.
After the failure of the Ajax in 1596, there was not another significant development in toilets until 1775, when the S-trap was invented, which is what makes our flush culture possible. In 1848, a banner year for plumbing, the English government passed the National Public Health Act and started building a sewer system. In 1866, a massive cholera outbreak spurred officials on. By World War I, England was a toilet-based society. The British transformation from poo-tossers to flushers took over 300 years.
Despite how long it took for the flush fad to catch on, we are now very attached to this system. We flush our waste away, and it’s pretty fantastic. We don’t have to think about it ever again. The worst we have to deal with is a bit of a leftover smell, to light a match. But the reality of the matter is that we have a very expensive system that, although very pleasant to us, is by and large counterproductive and illogical.
Composting toilets, also known as dry toilets or sawdust toilets, break down human urine and feces and transform it into fertilizer. Human waste is rich in nitrogen. The trick is to add a material rich in carbon, like sawdust or woodchips. Then tiny micro-organisms go to work, heating the mixture, breaking it down, turning it into rich soil. This, in a nutshell, is how dry toilets work. It’s a neat trick. But can it be more?
Joseph Jenkins is the unofficial godfather of the composting toilet movement. Jenkins has been recycling his and his family’s “humanure” since 1979. In 1995, he self-published his book The Humanure Handbook, less of a “how to” pamphlet than it is a manifesto about human waste. Jenkins covers practical considerations like how to build your own composting toilet, but his breadth and passion on the subject ranges from science to history to religion to philosophy. Jenkins covers both the technical stats on how to kill hookworm, and the philosophical implications that waste disposal has for man’s metaphysical idea of God.
When most people find out about composting toilets for the first time, they find the idea rather fascinating. Others think the idea of dry waste disposal hilarious, or disgusting, or just very, very strange. No matter the reaction, this sentiment is usually followed up with the corollary that it doesn’t matter anyway. Composting toilets sound very interesting, but fortunately for us, we have indoor plumbing. We don’t have to reach for the woodchips every time we take a leak. Despite this general reaction, the reality is that there are very good reasons for everyone, including Americans, to take the composting toilet idea seriously - from the world-wide water crisis to our upcoming infrastructure crisis to the future of American farming.
In Asia, various forms of composting have been practiced since before 3000 B.C. China used human waste for agriculture since the ancient Shang Dynasty. Composting as we know it today developed in Indore, India between the years 1924-1931. The practicioners used animal waste and mixed it with vegetable scraps.
Any organic matter can compost, or “break down” and become soil. Potato peels. A cotton t-shirt. A dead chicken. When a compost heap has a balance of carbon and nitrogen, the resulting soil is quite powerful fertilizer. The process is much like what happens on the forest floor – everything that dies breaks down and enriches the soil. The concept of “waste” does not exist.
Most people can accept the idea that vegetable scraps mixed with yard clippings can make fertilizer. After all, that’s a case of plants being used to grow plants. People get a little more skeptical when they’re told that the process also works with their own urine and feces. Reactions range from disbelief to disgust to, “Wait, isn’t that just night soil?” In fact, not at all. Night soil is the practice of placing human waste on crops the way it comes out of your body. We all know what that looks like. It’s pretty gross. By contrast, humanure is produced through “thermophilic composting.” Microorganisms heat organic matter to a very high temperature as they break it down. This process not only transforms the pile into rich soil, but it also reduces it to 1/10 of its original size.
Despite the fact that most Americans probably have never heard of a composting toilet, they have been quite popular in Scandinavia since the 1970s. In 1975 in Norway, for example, there were no less than 21 different models of composting toilets on the market. The most popular composting toilet is the Clivus Multrum. The average price range for a composting toilet today is between $1,500-$3,500. You could build your own for under 50 bucks. Sim Van Der Ryn’s book The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water is hailed as one of the best guides to composting toilets ever written. Though the book had become a relic of the “back to the land” literature of the 70s, it was republished in 2000.
In a commercially-manufactured composting toilet, your waste goes down into a chamber. The chamber self-heats, either powered by solar energy, or various electricity volt settings. Low voltage is generally useful in more rural situations. If you build your own composting toilet, you manually add sawdust or a similar cover material to the chamber below the seat each time you go to the bathroom. If the deposit is larger, more sawdust is added. The sawdust takes care of the smell and provides a good source of carbon. Remember: the 4 essentials needed for compost are moisture, oxygen, a high temperature, and a good carbon-nitrogen balance. Nitrogen comes from your waste. Plant cellulose is rich in carbon. Humanure compost can grow food and protect plants from bugs. What’s more - the same microorganisms that make composting possible can also break down chemicals, including gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, oil, grease, wood preservatives PCBs, coal wastes, refinery wastes, insecticides, herbicides, TNT, and other explosives.
Now consider our flush system - we literally shit in our drinking water. Every day, Americans flush 4.8 billion gallons of water down the toilet. Toilet flushing is the largest single use of water in most residential and commercial buildings. We pay 40% of our home water bills for the water we use to flush the toilet. In Poop Culture, Dave Praeger estimates that we poop into 32 billion gallons of drinking water each day. According to the EPA, the average American uses 9,000 gallons of water each year to flush away 230 gallons of “waste.” The current population of the United States is slightly over 300 million. That’s roughly 69,000,000,000 gallons of nutrient rich matter we’re spending our tax dollars to send away in potable water.
Meanwhile, there is a growing world-wide water crisis. Less than 1% of the world’s water is available to drink, and world population is growing. Over a billion people lack access to safe drinking water. The United Nations takes the problem seriously enough to name 2005-2015 the “Water For Life” decade. There is an increase in protests against exploitative privatization of water sources and unsustainable use of water, notably in South America and India. The 2003 World Water Forum in Kyoto was overwhelmed by protests and calls for water justice. Celebrity activists have campaigned for water to be named a human right. Experts warn that water is quickly becoming the “new oil” and predict future wars will be over water.
The Sierra Snowpack, central to the drinking water supply of California, is threatened by global warming. Orange County, California is starting to use an expensive, complicated process to turn their wastewater into drinking water. Scenarios like this call to mind the 1973 Charleston Heston film Soylent Green. In the movie, global warming has ravaged New York City and the government is making food out of dead bodies. Most people are not much more comfortable with the idea of quenching their thirst with a tall glass of former sewage.
Meanwhile, our national wastewater infrastructure is getting old. The EPA forsees a looming national crisis. In our federalist system, wastewater has largely been the responsibility and jurisdiction of state and local governments. According to an EPA report, the challenge to protect the gains in water quality of the past 30 years is to manage an aging system. The needed repairs will cost billions of dollars. Meanwhile, federal funds have dried up.
In 2002, Mayor Gary Podesto of Stockton, California privatized the municipal water system over organized public protest and turned it over to OMI/Thames Water. Podesto claimed that the city would save millions of dollars from the deal. The Mayor’s strategy for privatization was motivated by a lack of capital needed to update the town’s wastewater infrastructure to comply with federal requirements. The grassroots Concerned Citizens of Stockton Coalition fought to get their water back and sued Thames Water for violating California environmental law. The privatization experiment turned into one big mess. And Stockton is just the tip of the iceberg. The EPA notes that there is currently no centralized planning for the upcoming infrastructure crisis and predicts that the challenge will take a generation or more to resolve. One report came to the depressing conclusion that even “small steps” would be helpful.
How about investigating the potential of composting toilets? Just because it seems far-fetched doesn’t mean it is impossible. Consider how ridiculous the idea of a sewage system seemed to medieval hecklers of the Ajax. New developments in the drought-stricken west are strapped for water. Why not try out a dry toilet town?
Then there are the implications for farming. Books like Michael Pollan’s The Omnivores Dilemma and Fast-Food Nation by Eric Schlosser have educated consumers about the damage that industrial agriculture does to soil with synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides. Organic farms work to reverse this trend with collective farming methods and the use of compost. But imagine if farmers could organize and tap into a humanure collection system. There’s a lot of poop to go around.
Just how far afield is such an idea from the realm of possibility? Most people agree that modern plumbing is the “savior of civilization.” Jamie Benidickson’s book The Culture of Flushing traces our love affair with water-based waste management in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for the last 200 years. Flushers associate water with cleanliness. Katherine Ashenburg’s book The Dirt on Clean recalls how American society embraced “the gospel of hygiene.” Sewers and water mains could be installed more easily in newly built cities than in the ancient cities of Europe. John Griscom and John Riis led an urban sanitary reform movement in the mid-1800s. Municipal governments started regulating plumbing through health codes and plumbing laws. From the 1870s on, America was the plumbing leader of the western world. Flushing stopped the spread of disease and made everyone’s life better. So how could we ever abandon it?
Well consider this. We don’t recommend our Western plumbing system to developing nations. In countries where water is scarce and expensive, it is the idea of installing a water-based plumbing system that is ridiculous. Instead, the United Nations recommends local villages install composting toilets following the model of Indian Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak. Dr. Pathak, founder of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement, has led a humanitarian crusade since 1970 to use composting toilets to lift India’s “scavengers” out of degradation. The traditional occupation of the scavengers is manually cleaning human waste. Dr. Pathak is transforming the lives of these untouchables, members of India’s lowest social caste. After composting toilets are installed in a village, there is nothing to haul away but rich, dry soil. And his system only takes 5 to 6 days to kill all pathogens and fully compost the waste. Dr. Pathak has received numerous awards from the Indian government and was honored by Pope John Paul II. He’s even developed and implemented composting toilet projects in urban centers, something no engineer believed could be done.
In the developing world, where there is no existing infrastructure, it is pretty easy to see the logic of a dry toilet system. In Western countries that love flushing like the United States, the burden of proof is much higher. Dave Praeger ties the idea of flush culture to “fecal denial,” a deep-seated psychological anxiety about defecating. Pooping is connected to vulnerability, to our animal nature, to a sense of shame. In Western society, we don’t want to think about our poop. Given this culture, it’s not surprising that the idea of a dry toilet sounds disgusting to a lot of people. They imagine a putrid smell and flies buzzing above. The suggestion of using their feces for farming sounds downright crazy. Joseph Jenkins calls the belief that humanure is unsafe for agriculture “fecophobia,” a term he coined. Dr. Pathak has proved in India that when composting toilets are used properly, this is an ill-founded fear. Dr. Pathak’s system eliminates all pathogens in 5 to 6 days. If you build your own composting toilet, all human pathogens can be eliminated in a few months.
You have to wonder if people will ever read about flush systems and laugh at it the way we laugh at the thought of 14th century Londoners tossing fresh feces out the window. We may not be tossing steaming turds onto the street, but we are defecating in a dwindling supply of drinking water and flushing away nutrients with valuable potential for our soils. With resources dwindling, we ultimately have an unsustainable system. Like a leaky pipe, it works for us, but that doesn’t mean it’s time to close the book on waste management.
