When we first moved onto our property we had a composting toilet. It wasn’t like the fancy ones you can buy these days, it was literally a timber box, with a dunny seat and a bucket for collection of the deposits underneath! I would call this the very basic version of a composting toilet. So after you deposit your number one’s or number two’s in the bucket you place a scoop of sawdust to cover your deposit. Just like making a compost pile this is a mixture of Carbon the sawdust and Nitrogen the poo/wee! Ok no giggling I just wrote poo and wee on my blog!
These days there are a number of smart looking composting toilets, they basically look like a normal toilet but without the cistern. Whilst visiting friends houses and on my trip to Malawi I have used composting toilets and mostly until you lift the lid you can’t really tell the difference.
You wouldn’t think twice about throwing composted animal manure on the vegetable garden so flushing human manure down a normal toilet doesn’t really make that much sense. For some reason, not sure why, but when we designed our property 10 years ago, we opted for a flushing toilet system which goes to a septic tank and then a reed bed. The idea of this system is that if and when the septic overflows the water slowly seeps into the reed bed and the reeds suck up the nutrients and clean the water. Whilst this is also a good system but if we had our time over again we would have installed a composting toilet so we could have the added benefit of using the compost instead of sending it to our reedbed.
Composting Toilet at Never Ending Food, Malawi, Africa
Composting toilet rules in Malawi
Here’s a great article from Pip Magazine on composting loos, which will give you a run down on what’s hot when it comes to composting toilets. Click here to view.
May your compost toilet be filled with many great deposits!
Cheers,
Megan Cooke
Permaculture Teacher
