If you are longing to get off grid, a DIY composting toilet is simple to construct and use.  I built an experimental humanure toilet and used for a year on a trial basis (my bathroom is too small for two toilets!).  I was pleased with the results, and will make a second bathroom with it one of these days.  Knowing how to properly build a compost toilet is great for potential survival situations. If you choose to use one, you can save a little on the utility bills, reduce your impact on the environment, and open up new living possibilities such as cheap land, or your own mortgage free tiny house.   Even though things such as a homemade composting toilet, handwashing your laundry, or living without a fridge seem extreme to most people, these are valuable skills to have at your disposal. What is a Composting Toilet? A composting toilet is NOT an outhouse!  It does not smell.  It does not create pollution.  Building a compost toilet is a good way to take refuse and turn it into a resource.  

A DIY composting toilet takes human waste, and dry material such as sawdust, crushed leaves, or wood ash and composts it with straw at a high heat to kill potential pathogens.  At the end of the process you are left with sweet smelling, clean, and hygenic compost. How to Build a Homemade Composting Toilet Building a simple sawdust toilet can be as easy as balancing a toilet seat over the top of a five gallon bucket, or a gorgeous handcrafted wooden work of art.   Here’s a quick tutorial on how to build a simple yet sturdy DIY composting toilet.You will need two five gallon buckets of the same height, four 2x4s the same height as the buckets, a toilet seat plus hardware, a piece of plywood larger than your toilet seat, and eight screws. Saw a hole that is the same size as the five gallon buckets into your piece of plywood. Line your toilet seat up centered over the hole you just cut.  Mark where to drill holes for the toilet seat hardware.   Screw a 2×4 at each corner of your plywood to create four legs.

Stand the frame up onto it’s legs.  It’s time to start putting it all together! Attach the toilet seat to the plywood. Place one bucket so it fits into the large hole in the plywood.  Add a few inches of your cover material (such as sawdust) and it’s ready to use! How to Use Your DIY Composting Toilet Before using a bucket the first time make sure there is a few inches of cover material in the bucket.  Use as you would any toilet.  Discount Tires Grand JunctionInstead of flushing, cover all the contents with a thick layer of cover material.  Vail Lift Tickets For SaleThe cover material is the big key to making this system work.  Dogs For Sale Gaylord MiSawdust is ideal, because it is fine, and absorbent.  

I know people have used peat moss and crushed dry leaves with good success.  I had none of those things available, and had good results using wood ash from our woodburning stove.  Completely cover all contents with the cover material. When the bucket is full, put in an empty bucket and take the full bucket out to your outdoor compost bin.  A three bin system works best with compost toilets.  That way you have one to fill, one to cure for a year, and one to harvest finished compost.  To keep your carbon and nitrogen levels balanced make sure to add lots of dry material such as straw.  Use plenty of straw. When your bin is full, let the compost cure for a year.  If you are planning to use the finished compost on edibles make sure that it reaches an internal temperature of 122 degrees for at least one week to destroy all potential pathogens.  If it does not reach high temperatures it is safest to let it cure for second year.  If you don’t want to wait two years it’s still safe to use on non-food crops or orchards.  

There are compost thermometers available to check temperatures. If the idea of composting human waste is new, I suggest reading Holy Shit by Gene Logsdon (affiliate link).  It’s entertaining, yet informative.  If you want a more in depth look at composting toilets The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins (affiliate link) is the way to go.   The Humanure Handbook can also be downloaded for free here. This post shared at: From the Farm Blog Hop and Simple Saturdays Blog Hop, It was hard to limit the list to just ten. With a mix of proven technologies, award- winning prototypes and an eye-catching entry at Maker Faire Africa this year, we present ten ways to put poop and pee to good use.Four young Nigerian women ages 14 and 15 made interesting headlines when they debuted their urine-powered generator at Maker Faire Africa in Lagos this month. The device uses electrolysis to separate hydrogen from the water in urine and then fuels a generator with the gas. Water might work just as well, but saying your phone charged on urine just makes more of a splash, so to speak.

If 40 percent of the people in India stored their urine to use it on their crops, the country’s farmers could save $26.7 million (1.2 billion rupees) in fertilizer expenses, Sridevi Govindaraj calculated when she completed her doctoral thesis in ecological sanitation at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Bangalore. Incidentally, she may be the only person in India with a doctorate in ecological sanitation.Our bodies make about four to eight cups (one to two liters) of urine per day, and it’s rich in nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, the same elements that crops love. It’s also pretty cheap to make. Urine, Sridevi told E4C, is a useful resource.E4C news:Urine is fertilizing crops and saving money in India Appropedia: Liquid fertiliser systemNASA is developing a complex, expensive and, as it turns out, somewhat buggy machine that purifies human urine to recycle the water for astronauts to drink. Rex Walheim, a NASA mission specialist, tests the Forward Osmosis Pump Syringe in the photo, injecting a colored “Challenge Liquid” into the Forward Osmosis Bag on the middeck of the Atlantis.It may be much easier to purify urine for drinking here on the ground, however.

We’ve heard of the theory that drinking urine has health benefits, and fresh urine can be sanitary (although it could pick up pathogens on its way out of the body if the person has a disease). But for the select few who are trapped in a desert with no water and can’t stomach the thought of drinking straight urine with no chaser, we suggest making a solar still. The still uses the sun’s radiation to evaporate water from the urine, collecting the condensate on a surface, such as plastic wrap, and channeling it into a container to drink.YouTube: How to make a solar water distiller E4C Solutions Library: Solar Water DistillerBlack soldier fly larvae thrive in feces, and after processing, they make for nutritious farm animal and fish feed, and also biodiesel. A research team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is looking into how to raise them in central facilities on a diet of waste collected from latrines. An earlier, alternate version of the plan is a fly-catching latrine that lures the pests in but prevents their escape, turning the latrines into fly killers and possibly even larvae producers.

Field tests are underway now in Cape Town, South Africa.Sanitation Ventures: Black soldier fly additives Sanitation Ventures newsletter: Toilets and fly larvae project, pg. 13Composting latrines turn a sanitation problem in an agricultural solution. In fact, Jason Kass, founder of Toilets for People, recently called a variant of a composting latrine the “toilet of the future,” in a guest column for E4C.The basic ecological composting latrine design is two pits, one covered with a semi- mobile structure that is the actual toilet and walls. You mix the human waste with materials such as ash and yard clippings or agricultural waste. When the pit is full, you move the structure to the second pit, cover the first and let natural bacteria and the animal agents of decomposition do their work. When the waste is naturally processed, dig up the compost and spread it as a safe fertilizer on crop fields.Variations of the design collect the waste in removable drums for off-site composting. Toilets for People and SOIL are two organizations promoting this method in Haiti.E4C news: High-tech toilets? 

What we need is a low-tech toilet revolution Five questions with Sasha Kramer (SOIL)E4C Solutions Library: Ecological Sanitation Latrine Compost Toilets in Waterlogged AreasRural Bolivia has a toilet shortage. Fewer than half of rural Bolivians have regular access to a toilet, according to the World Health Organization. But with such scarcity, by definition toilets are strange, foreign objects, and many people there are not inclined to try them out. Aid organizations have given away composting latrines to communities in the region, but studies show that only one-fifth to half of them are used correctly. Instead, people defecate on the open ground. To entice better use of the free toilets, Water for People is experimenting with a composting business venture. Compost from correctly used latrines is spread on reforested land planted with Monterrey pine saplings. The pine trees provide a habitat for expensive bolete mushrooms, which can generate relatively high incomes for the communities.

We see evidence of some creative problem solving in that experiment, but the general concept of cashing in on compost is not unique to Water for People. SOIL and other organizations, some mentioned here and elsewhere on E4C, are also turning poop into profit with some encouraging results.Not to leave out number two, an example of the fertilization powers of urine is an odd experiment in raising watercress. A Web page that is enthusiastically named drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee offers a kit and a how-to guide to growing (supposedly) edible watercress in a bowl full of urine.E4C news: Toilets for mushrooms: An experiment to improve sanitation Submersible Design: Urine fertilizer watercress DIY kitOne of the gases that lends human waste its stench is methane, which, as 13-year-old boys with matches worldwide must know, burns. A biogas digester collects methane as microbes produce it inside a closed container (oxygen can be deadly to microscopic methane-producers). With the right equipment, gas channeled from a container of waste could generate electricity, heat water for homes and industry and cook food on a gas range.

Sanergy, the organization behind the useful bicycle modification that converts it into a latrine pump, also promotes biogas production from waste collected from urban communities in developing countries.E4C news: A bike-powered poop pump is redefining low-cost sanitation E4C Solutions Library: Biogas Pit Latrine Biogas Cooking, Nepal Domestic biogas plant, ChinaMichael Hoffmann’s Gates Foundation award-winning toilet prototype uses solar power to break human waste into hydrogen gas and leftover solids. Hoffman and his team at Caltech showed how the toilet could store hydrogen in fuel cells as an energy source. The toilet treats waste on the spot and syphons off hydrogen for later use as energy.In a unique variation of biogas production from human waste, researchers at Delft University of Technology have worked out a way to produce synthetic gas – “syngas” – which is a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Their Gates Foundation award- winning design dries the waste on the spot and zaps it with microwaves to heat it into a plasma for gasification (all proprietary technology).

Then the toilet stores the gas in a solid state fuel cell stack to produce electricity.The design is affordable, the researchers say. Like other prototypes on this list, we mention this as a point of interest while we’re waiting to see if the end products are also practical. No photo is available.It turns out that urinating on a jellyfish sting will do little to alleviate the burn and could actually exacerbate it. and other sources for this important expose. This new information raises a question, though: If it doesn’t work, then who spread this rumor to begin with?With the last use debunked, we’d like add a final use for human waste: Fuel briquettes. Not compost, not biogas or hydrogen fuel cells, but actual, burnable fuel made from treated human waste. Researchers from the University of Colorado in Boulder won a Gates Foundation grant to develop a solar-powered toilet that turns waste into biochar.And researchers from RTI International in North Carolina won a Gates Foundation grant for their toilet design that converts waste into fuel briquettes that it burns for storable energy.