10081 Humanure Management

Thermophilic composting requires no electricity and therefore no coal combustion, no acid rain, no nuclear power plants, no nuclear waste, no petrochemicals and no consumption of fossil fuels. The composting process produces no waste, no pollutants and no toxic by-products. Thermophilic composting of humanure can be carried out century after century, millennium after millennium, with no stress on our ecosystems, no unnecessary consumption of resources and no garbage or sludge for our landfills. And all the while it will produce a valuable resource necessary for our survival while preventing the accumulation of dangerous pathogenic waste. — Joseph Jenkins, The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure

In the United States, we pay large amounts of money and create a complicated infrastructure to supply us with pure water. Then we urinate and defecate in it and flush it away to go through another round of cleansing and purification. It is not logical.

It is a system so fraught with legal and emotional issues that it is a difficult target for rational thought and design. In most areas, anything sustainable you want to do with humanure at the present time other than flush it down the toilet will likely be illegal, so “mum’s the word,” as they say, about your plan. Loose lips expose the compost toilet to government persecution! What the government inspectors don’t know can’t cause you grief. Do not give in to the superstition that unjust laws should be obeyed just because they are laws.

Here’s a true example. A few years ago I contacted the plumbing inspection department of Oklahoma City government to find out if it was legal to install a composting toilet. It took several calls to find out the situation. No one really wanted to talk with me. Finally, I guess they got tired of me calling back, so they called back and told me that —

1. It is legal to install a composting toilet in OKC.
2. By law all toilets must be connected with a sewer system or septic tank, so a composting toilet must be connected to a sewer system or septic tank.

That of course destroys the purpose of the composting toilet, a fact readily admitted by the city plumber who spoke with me. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a tragedy for the ecology of this area.

In cities, the first strategy, within reach of nearly everyone, is harm reduction:

If it’s yellow it’s mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down. In other words, don’t flush urine. This reduces the amount of fresh clean water wasted with our sewer systems.

Never flush anything down a toilet other than water, humanure, and toilet paper. Never flush:

• Menstruation products
• Medications
• Condoms
• Cigarette butts and ashes
• Live fish, baby alligators, or snakes
• Toxic cleaning solutions

Replace conventional flush toilets, which use five gallons of water per flush, with low-water flush toilets. Ignore the jeers and jabs from the uninformed who complain about having to flush twice to cleanse the bowl. While there were problems with the first generation of low-flush toilets, those have been resolved.

Most toilet bowl cleaning products are toxic waste. All of these items cause problems downstream. We get an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality from the media. That isn’t a very permacultural way to think about important issues.

Instead of using, and thus flushing into the watershed, harsh chemical cleaners, use natural products like vinegar, baking soda, borax, lemon juice. Clean your toilet regularly to prevent build-up of scale.

A second level of improvement is to save your urine and use it to irrigate plants. Urinate into a bottle or bucket. Dilute one part urine with ten parts water. Fertilize plants by pouring on the surface of the soil. It doesn’t take long to get over the ick factor. Urine is inherently sterile (unlike feces which can be loaded with pathogenic bacteria) and so unless the person has a bladder infection, it is fine for this purpose. If you don’t have your own garden or container plants, then do some guerrilla fertilizing of public flower beds and shrubberies. Don’t tell anyone.

Another urine strategy is to urinate into a sawdust or shredded leaf “toilet,” which is a bucket filled with either sawdust or shredded leaves. Keep adding leaves and sawdust as necessary, and when full, add to your compost pile.

The above strategies are relatively accessible to just about everybody. Going further, and composting your feces, is more complicated. Jenkin’s book, Humanure Handbook, is the first and last word on the subject. It is available free on line (see the additional references section of this section). If you plan to compost your feces, read the book and follow his instructions to the letter.