Composting toilets would save water
and, uh, resources.
There’s
a photo-word
montage on the Internet in which a little boy, presumably from
Africa, looks skeptically at a woman who is apparently from somewhere else. The
boy asks, “You mean to tell me you have so much clean water, that you (poop) in
it?”
Umm…yeah.
Yeah, we do. But why?
Flush
toilets magically make all that human waste vanish in an instant, so we can go
on with our day in blissful denial that anything unpleasant-smelling ever came
out of our bodies at all.
What’s
the cost for that modern convenience? An awful lot of water.
According
to the Environmental Protection Agency, an average American family of four can flush over 100 gallons of water per
day down their toilet. That number can skyrocket to 200 gallons
if the toilet doesn’t stop running, and can decrease by over a gallon per flush
if you get an efficient “WaterSense” toilet.
Innovations
like low-flow toilets and waterless urinals can decrease the amount of water
pouring into treatment plants.
Even
the most water-conserving systems are still wasteful in two ways. First, they
flush away some clean water. Second, they throw away a nutrient-rich resource.
Yes, I’m calling your number twos a “resource.”
Our
sewage systems combine everything that goes down the drain in homes and
businesses with water, mix it together, and then attempt to clean up that
liquid. The problem is, so to speak, you can’t put Humpty Dumpty together
again. Not perfectly, anyway.
Once
human waste and once-clean water mix together with pharmaceuticals, pesticides,
flame retardants, antibacterial soap, cosmetics, Drano, and everything else
that goes down the drain, it’s nearly impossible to separate it once again.
Our
current method involves separating solids from liquids to clean the sewage
water, which experts want you to call “effluent.” Wastewater treatment is hard
and expensive. No matter how well it’s done, the effluent released into the
environment is not simply pure
water.
For
example, scientists found that a common ingredient in antibacterial soap
released into the Mississippi River in effluent breaks down into cancer-causing
dioxins.
The
solids sent to wastewater treatment plants are composted and treated as
thoroughly as possible before they are disposed of using various imperfect
methods. One such option is applying them to farm fields as “fertilizer,” even
though they still contain many
toxins in them. Sometimes they even sell the treated sludge to home
gardeners under brand names like Milorganite.
Outhouses
aren’t a real option in crowded cities, town, and suburbs. What else can you
do? Well, you could consider getting a composting
toilet. In my experience, composting toilets have no smell or other
unpleasant features. You sit, do your thing, and “flush” by adding something
like pine shavings to aid in the composting process. That’s it. You probably
don’t want to fertilize your lettuce with your composted waste, but you can
easily use it to plant a tree.
Changing
our entire approach to dispensing with human waste wouldn’t be easy. But
sticking with the status quo means continuing to waste water and compost, even
as several regions of our country are suffering droughts. Using composting
toilets won’t keep soap out of our wastewater stream, but it will keep it out
of our, um, fertilizer.
Maybe
it’s time for those who can to opt out of this wasteful system by conserving
water and putting our number twos to work by switching to composting toilets.
OtherWords columnist
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org