One of the great things about our way of life is thought to be due for a replacement, hmmm! Not!
Sustainable Living: Going flushless for environment
October 07, 2007
Since Thomas Crapper invented the water closet (yes, that really is his name), many experts have come to view our sanitation system as the worst idea of all time. We use 3.5 gallons (per flush) of our best drinking water to dilute a few ounces of "excellent fertilizer and soil conditioner" to create an expensive, wasteful disposal problem. And we do it several times a day, in every American household, suspending a yearly average of 80 pounds of waste in 75,000 gallons of water per family.
The World Health Organization recently declared that waterborne sanitation is obsolete, and only waterless disposal of waste will allow enough water for drinking, cooking and washing in the world's largest cities.
Waterless and low-flow toilets could save the average household as much as $50 to $100 a year on water, adding up to $11.3 million every day nationally. These are not the same low-flow toilets that gained a well-deserved bad reputation 10 years ago.
Technology has improved even the lowly Crapper so that most new toilets use only about 1.6 gallons per flush.
Sweden has popularized a dual-bowl toilet with separate compartments and separate ways of treating human waste. This system uses no water and results in a high-quality fertilizer and composted human manure as byproducts. The separating toilets have a cost comparable to American toilets, but may take a while to catch on. Dual-flush toilets are becoming more popular here in the states and offer users a choice of 0.8 or 1.6 gallons per flush, depending on the size of the job.
COMPOSTING TOILETS are completely waterless and can be self-contained or attached to a whole building system. If you have many bathrooms, a whole building system would be the most economical. It connects all the dry toilets to a single large compost tank usually in the basement. There is no sewer hookup, so the plumbing ends in the compost tank.
A self-contained composting toilet is essentially a compost drum enclosed inside a toilet with a fold-out handle and tray. Some also contain fans and vents to eliminate odors.
