

Lavatory Laboratory: How sanitation is following the cell phone model - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/7/waste/lavatory-laboratory

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nakedrobot2
We used compost (sawdust) toilets in our house for a few months before we had
indoor plumbing. Before I read "The Humanure Handbook" I thought the very idea
was some kind of awful hippie bullshit. However now I have realized something
that is really obvious when you try it:

Some machines and designs have been perfected for centuries. The toilet
however is not one of them! Because it took us so long to discover how germs
make us sick, our toilets were really horrible things.

In fact, it has taken us so long to understand sanitation, composting, and the
environmental impact of using fresh-water flushing toilets, that the entire
human race has become used to an activity (flushing toilets) that is
astoundingly wasteful (you're not only wasting drinking water, but you're
wasting excellent nutrients in your own shit which is then lost to sewage
sludge, which itself takes huge resources to purify)

The thing is, you can totally recycle all human (and food) waste without much
of an inconvenience and really no smell at all. Yes, let me repeat that - no
smell at all. You crap in a bucket of sawdust, cover it completely with more
sawdust, and the bucket _does not smell_.

The fact that our civilization has taught itself that flushing our shit away
with drinking water is "the right thing to do" is really very troubling and
wrong once you realize the _vast_ resources that could be saved by some very,
very basic stuff like sawdust toilets and composting.

I am aware that achieving this on an urban scale would be a challenge, but it
can certainly be solved.....

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michael_h
Yes, the sawdust-compost toilet works, but is it a viable option? I'd like it
to be, but whenever I come across something like this, I put myself into the
imagined mind of whoever is the pop-tart of the day (say, the One Direction
kids or the girl who hates streaming...can't think of her name). Are they
going to go through with the sawdust-on-poo ritual? Probably not.

Any solution that displaces the modern toilet will need to be _at least_ as
easy and thoughtless to operate as the current setup. I think a half-way
solution is to outfit houses with a greywater circuit that could be used for
the toilets. That would make a tremendous cut into the amount of drinking
water that toilets are using.

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leoedin
There's commercially available composting toilets which automate much of the
required work. My parents use a compact Sun Mar toilet which is compact and
very low maintenance. It looks like a really oversized toilet. The same
company build larger units which do most of the composting in the basement -
these look very similar to normal toilets.

[http://www.sun-mar.com/prod.html](http://www.sun-mar.com/prod.html)

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spacecowboy_lon
The only problem is these Alternate methods are qute good for small low desity
vilages but tend not to work very well at scale like the rapidly growing cites
in china and india.

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anovikov
I am sure there is no way to bypass infrastructure development. You could
bypass building phone infrastructure by a mobile phone, but that won't work
for broadband internet (too little bandwidth in the air physically for
everyone to have a decent connection). You will have to dig ditches and lay
fiber optic cable, and have government, law and order, and institutions well-
developed enough to allow for that.

Same with sanitation, whatever your toilet is you can't really get rid of
disease without running water. Having running water it is straightforward to
build sewerage using same underground collectors.

It too much reminds me of futile attempts of commies 100 years ago to build
communism by killing all capitalists: there is no shortcut here, you've got to
have per capita GDP high enough to have communism first (so far, 100 years
later, we're still not there), then it comes naturally and you don't have to
kill anyone.

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ChuckMcM
I read a PopSci article about a design firm that had created a pet waste
disposal reactor at a public park, as it digested the poop it lit a park
light. We saw how successful the 'gravity light' was (and its recent big
brother is making news) so why not human manure digesters? [1] Sure we don't
produce as much as herbivores but it seems like you set up a "power station"
at a village, collect peoples donations and dispense tokens, and then can take
tokens to enable an outlet where they recharge their phones. Or perhaps just
provide a lighted area?

[1]
[http://www.mda.state.mn.us/renewable/waste.aspx](http://www.mda.state.mn.us/renewable/waste.aspx)

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jmcmahon443
I am an MEP coordinator. Poop keeps me awake at night.

