Dealing with Human Manure: A Compost Toilet Project
by Koby Jeschkeit-Hagen

How many times a day do you flush a conventional toilet? Even though many of us in areas where potable water is a precious commodity “let it mellow when it’s yellow,” we still need to flush a few times every day. For the average household, 30 gallons of potable water are used in the toilet system per day. Like most of us with “modern” plumbing, I could ignore my most basic daily output and keep flushing it down, but I’ve been having daytime nightmares as to the whereabouts of my own human manure (humanure). It could be running amuck in a huge sludge field or in an expensive chemically treated holding tank, inevitably contaminating the precious groundwater in my own community or my neighbor’s.

Therefore, in order to eliminate haunting myself and hundreds of unknown others with my humanure, as my summer intern project I have taken on the design and construction of an outdoor composting toilet for the daily use of visitors and Seeds of Change staff. This compost toilet would provide four obvious benefits:
1) It would be an outdoor restroom designed to handle the influx of humanure on the farm;
2) The toilet would be another on-site source for landscaping compost;
3) Furthermore, it would diminish the farm’s reliance on unsustainable septic and sludge treatment and holding facilities, and lastly;
4) It would serve as a demonstrative, functional, and educational example for other businesses, communities, and families to move toward a closed-loop system.

After researching composting toilet models, a two-story, passive solar, dry-composting toilet seems to be the best design option for a composting toilet at the farm. With gracious guidance and assistance on project design and implementation from the Permaculture Institute and Alfred van Bachmayr at World Hands Project, this project will be completed by the end of the summer. A project update with photographs of humanure’s new home will be in upcoming newsletters, so please stay tuned.

If you are interested in more information about composting toilet systems, please review the following helpful materials:

The Composting Toilet System Book, Version 1.2. David Del Porto and Carol Steinfeld. The Center for Ecological Pollution Prevention (CEPP). 2000.

The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure. Joseph Jenkins. Chelsea Green Publishing Company. 2005

The Toilet Papers, Sim Van der Ryn. Chelsea Green Publishing Company. 1999.

Koby Jeschkeit-Hagen
Seeds of Change Change Research Farm Intern