Composting toilet November 3, 2008

There are some crazy fancy schmancy composting toilets on the market. They seem to start at around $1500. That’s all well and good, but they still require electricity! And all that fuss to not get too near our own poop? Um, we wipe our bottoms; we’re getting pretty darned near it! I changed diapers for years. It’s all pretty strange, really!

I just bought this very inexpensive and simple composting toilet for under $200 plus shipping. I could have made it myself for much less but I can’t do everything myself and this price is a lot more attractive than the over the top ridiculous composting toilets. This dude Joseph Jenkins wrote a book on composting human manure (“humanure”) and it’s free online. It was a good skim of that that convinced me to go ahead with this system as a way to support him and get one more thing checked off our list.

The truth is that I don’t expect we’ll ever actually use our so-called Loveable Loo. I just needed an answer to the question of how we would comfortably and conveniently deal with our waste in a hygenic fashion should there be no power and no running water. For now, this unit will probably remain in the box in which it ships and get stored in our shed. But should we ever need it, it is helpful to know it’s there.

Now to continue to figure out what to do in the event of no toilet paper. I have googled like mad on this and people have some really strange ideas. It seems pretty obvious to me; all you really need is water. I see lots of portable bidet systems, but they seem to all run on batteries. I can’t see why a foot or hand pump isn’t an option. Off to google some more to see if I can find this. After my first birth, I learned it was too painful to wipe with toilet paper anyway because of the stitches. There is some squeeze bottle that the midwives pack into a kit. It wasn’t explained in advance but I did figure out the purpose. I am not sure that bottle alone would be enough to do a decent job of cleaning feces, but if I can’t find anything else, we’ll have some of those on hand in case toilet paper runs out. And those of you saying, “Use cloth”, sure, sure. I have used cloth diapers. But that is on baby poops and with a washing machine and hot water. Hand washing cloths with adult poop just doesn’t really seem sanitary to me. I suppose I could boil them. Somehow this whole thing horrifies me. I’ll do it if I have to, but squeeze bottles seem so much nicer!