Here's a toilet with a twist

When I was a wee lad, my family had a cottage in rural Ontario where we would go every summer for vacation. It was rural on a scale that makes my head spin now, but at the time it was a great adventure. We had no electricity, no running water and we had what I now know to be a pit toilet in the bathroom. It was an awful, foul-smelling affair; essentially an indoor outhouse. A pit toilet is a toilet with a large hole in the bottom of it. The toilet sits over a cistern and whatever goes into it lands with a splash after a short delay. But when you're that far from civilization and you have no access to running water, hygienic options are limited. Unpleasant to remember as an adult and the horror to end all horrors when you're nine.

Anyhow, I want to maintain a watch on the horizon with reference to domestic constructing tendencies and sustainability may be very a great deal considered one of my buzzwords. What does this have to do with a pit toilet in an in any other case fascinating cottage in the center of nowhere? Pay attention.

I was watching a TV show on sustainable building recently and the show's host dropped in on the Bronx Zoo to check out a new public restroom they built. The Eco Restroom at the Bronx Zoo accommodates a half million people a year and uses 3 oz. of water for each time one of those visitors flushes a toilet. The host was saying that the eco-restroom saves a million gallons of water a year using a composting system instead of the typical low-flush toilets required by building codes.

I heard "composting toilet" and flashed back right now to the pit lavatory of my early life. But I kept looking, despite my terrible associations. It turns out that a composting lavatory is nothing like a pit bathroom. It is an odorless, closed device that turns human waste into fertilizer. Most of them use no water in any respect, but the gadget the Bronx Zoo makes use of a tiny bit of water to generate foam from biodegradable cleaning soap. This foam permits a foam-flush composting toilet to look and behave like a conventional toilet. The image above and to the proper is how one seems, and beneath is a diagram that indicates the way it works.

Our society expends exquisite assets securing a safe, smooth water supply for absolutely everyone. Then as people, we flip around and flush forty% of that clean, safe water down the bathroom. If that were not wasteful sufficient, the resulting effluent wishes to be handled at greater amazing expense handiest to be dumped into nearest body of water after the solids were eliminated. Yet nobody seems to know why crimson tide blooms are so awful in my beloved Gulf of Mexico. This machine, like such a lot of different ones, is unsustainable. It's unsustainable economically as well as environmentally.

But there's a solution accessible and using that answer would require that folks get over a number of their squeamishness on the subject.

The system at the Bronx Zoo was installed by a company called Clivus Multrum in Massachusetts. Clivus Multrum refined and brought to market the idea of a modern, composting toilet more than 30 years ago. Clivus also invented the foam-flush toilet.

How their gadget works is quite easy and easy. Human waste is stored in an enclosed chamber and time, biology and gravity work together to show that waste into fertilizer. There's no stink, no mess, no polluted groundwater, no expenses related to what to do with it. Not to get all granola or anything, but what it does too is go back to the soil the vitamins you failed to want.

There is an entire lifestyle accessible devoted to composting bathrooms I'm getting to know, and a clearinghouse for information on the difficulty is a internet site known as Composting Toilet World. That sounds just like the call of a specifically spooky campground or something, however they have got a few in reality great information and resources.

Now I love the idea of a twin-flush lavatory, however the concept of a composting bathroom takes the idea embodied in a twin-flush and takes it to an intense the purist in me loves. All Hail Clivus Multrum!