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

The Composting Toilet System Book: A Practical Guide to Choosing, Planning and Maintaining Composting Toilet Systems – A Water-saving, Pollution-preventing Wastewater Solution

But there are outdoor toilets, latrines, holes in the ground and then compost toilets. These are completely different creatures. In fact, the creatures are what we want to cultivate in the compost version, and maintaining a good balance of carbon based substances to the nitrogen and phosphates that we deliver so regularly down the chute. Also, air. If we deprive the little bugs of oxygen, the mix becomes anaerobic and stinks big time. If it becomes too dry, it also stops the bug party and stops breaking down properly. And can also smell.

There is a lot of research and excellent publications that describe this process (and compost toilet design) in detail, but probably the best and most accessible (like free) is the humanure handbook, which is online as a PDF.

Read it and weep – at how poorly educated we have all been, all these years, about the phenomenal waste of treated drinking water we merrily flush down the pan, or the lost opportunity of viewing our waste as a valuable resource for restoring fertility and life to the soil (if it’s properly composted).

I think back to the thousands of latrines I have organised or funded in disaster or post-disaster areas, like Liberia, Bosnia, Aceh, Somalia, Maldives, Eritea or Albania, etc. where we (NGOs / UN) have erected latrine blocks – on alters to the Guru of Smell. And often of public health hazard. Never in all these countries, had we considered human waste as anything but a public health nuisance. Even in the arid areas where good loamy soil is much needed to get a few trees re-established or to bring on some above ground crops.

Or in small island states (like the Maldives) where local septic tank run-off is polluting the precious fresh water resource just underground. ANd where the land is so salinated it too is desperate for some less sandy soil. Instead of compost (or better, biogas toilets) we pipe it out to sea, or make a thicker septic tank and hope for the best.

This used to get me very flustered: surely the international humanitarian community could incorporate this and a thousand other really basic ecological construction and clean energy design solutions ? Surely local universities and Governments in the disaster affected areas need access to this information, to make an informed choice?

These were some of the drivers for setting up RESET in 2007, and many of us tried to get the word out in lectures and training talks. And many are still very active, and RESET is running some training courses this summer in fact. Meanwhile, I am learning to love our bugs, and what they like to eat down there in the cool home we ave made for them, where they consumer our waste in silent and odourless darkness.

Quick summary of process:

- structure build from reclaimed wood from the main house, and some bits of pruned olive trees
- Two chambers, each about 1 square meter. For rotation, when the first if full. When second is full, first will be composted.
- We lined the chambers with a clay-sand-straw-water (cob) mix, to give it thermal mass – to regulate temperature differences, considering the extreme summer heat and cold nights.
- vent pipe installed to allow any methane to escape.

Original blog post.

The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water

Original Quinta da Cabeca do Mato post.

Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure

There are two items conspicuously absent from our off-grid house, a cooker, because we eat almost entirely raw food, and a loo, because it’s, well, outside…
The modern norm of flush toilets that scoot our “waste” away down underground pipes to some municipal cesspit, sewage treatment centre, or worse, a nearby river or the sea, is one of those unquestioned “conveniences” that mark the insanity of the industrialized world. The concept of waste does not exist in nature.

Original post from the awakened life project.