Compost Toilets

http://cernunnos.es/2011/10/newcomers-autumn-and-unnar/

The coming of visitors (Hello Dan, Ola & Olivier!) lurched us into building comfortable toilet facilities so others wouldn’t have to poo in a bucket. We’ve constructed a small dry stone terrace and a lovely wooden bench for you to sit on and poo while gazing up at the stars. The benchtop opens and the buckets of poo and sawdust removed, dumped into our pile of compost that is brewing to become future year’s rich garden soil. We’ve decided not to build a grandiose structure around the terrace and bench as very soon we’d like to move the toilet bench indoors and put a chicken shack on the terrace; so until then all will be pooing in comfort with an outdoor breeze. We have managed to attain a fairly decent level of comfort for guests who are still camping but can shit on a posh bench.

Milkwood Permaculture, Australia.

“Wendell Berry once said if you eat, you’re involved. He was talking about agriculture, but if you ask me, he really meant humanure. Getting your outputs sorted is a big and necessary task. For us, that meant designing and implementing a composting toilet system based on wheelie bins.

I thought I’d better give out the details of our compost toilet bin system, as we’re receiving many emails asking for the specifics of how the system fits together. It’s a simple design, but one that we’re very happy with. Here’s how the bins work:

The whole point of having these bins as our composting toilet system was to remove the need to handle the humanure until it had gone through its composting process and was safe to handle. We’re fine with handling open buckets of our own family’s sawdust-covered poo within a small humanure toilet system, but when we have a course here at Milkwood we can have up to 70 people on the farm each day. And though I value their presence (and their poo) I prefer not to process their collective contributions while they’re fresh, if i can avoid it.

So the bins are our solution. When one fills up, you roll it out, stand it aside in the sun, roll another empty in, lock it into place and continue on. No bucket handling, no processing. And a year later, each full bin has transformed into a rich, safe humus, ready to be added to the rootzone of our food forest trees. We label each full bin so we have a full inventory of when each lot of humanure will be ready to use.

The bins we’re using are normal 200 litre wheelie bins, used for household rubbish in Australia. We add a vent at the top of the back panel, a tap outlet at the bottom of the back panel, and a grate inside the bin. Each bin takes about 1 hour to prepare all up, and are best done as a batch. Once a bin is adapted, you’ve got it adapted for life, so it’s a worthy time investment.

The Grate
Each compost toilet bin has a home-made grate in them which sits about 5cm off the bottom of the bin. This grate provides a permeable barrier between the solids and woodchips coming into the bin, and the bottom of the bin reservoir. Any liquid (and there isn’t much, as the woodchips absorb most of it) moves through this grate and fills the bottom of the bin, and then drains out the bottom through the tap.

The grates were made by cutting a piece of galvanised steel mesh to size, and then adding a polyethylene surround (19mm low density irrigation pipe) to the mesh and wiring it on. A shadecloth cover is then tied to the grate to filter finer particles. The finished grate is wired to 4 bar chairs (the little plastic cones that support rebar while concrete is being poured), which raise it off the bottom of the bin. The completed grate can then be placed inside the bin, and can be removed easily when the humanure is used at the end of it’s composting cycle.”

Read more/original.

Korashan Project, Central Portugal.

Another blog post about humanure composting, from central portugal:

http://permaculturinginportugal.net/blog/compost-toilet-bin-and-log-store/

We’re following Joe Jenkins‘ method for our composting toilets, so this is how we built our compost pile, using bracken as our organic sponge. Bracken harvested at this time of year has the additional advantage of holding together very well when it’s shaped into a ‘nest’ to hold the material to be composted in the centre. As well as mixing in green stuff with the humanure and sawdust, we also add kitchen scraps and the wood ash from the stove.

The toilet itself is constructed from a WWI-vintage wooden army chest (then the property of one Company Sergeant Major Grist of the Royal Corps of Signals) which has seen over 30 years’ service with me as a linen chest, toy box and dressing-up box before ending up as the thunderbox. A circular hole is cut in the lid of the chest which exactly fits the diameter of the 20-litre plastic containers that fit inside.

Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants

Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure