copyright 2012 Nance Klehm

SE Portland dry toilet

I don’t use a flushie often, I made the decision to ‘go dry’ years ago, adopting the bucket toilet + sawdust system as it pairs nicely with my composting obsession and food growing habit.

I am staying at Erik and Kelly’s, whose low flush toilet and antique piping can’t seem to handle even the most modest bodily donation. Once our flushing attempt proves unsuccessful, and immediately following the ‘oh no…’ guilty grimace, we play a light-hearted blame game blame game and then according to homestead rules, Erik snaking is Erik’s job. The closet augur is kept on the front porch (to greet visitors?) Erik augers for a few minutes, flushes successfully, marches the tool back outside to air out and we settle back into our routines relieved that our burdens are flowing into the larger mystery of pipes and their soupy contents to the municipal waste treatment plant miles away.

But with Erik and Kelly out of town this weekend, the daily chores of feeding the kittens, letting out the single hen to roam the yard and snaking, if so needed, falls on me. And yes, the toilet clogged and no, I will not assume the blame. I am regular enough (2-3x/day) as are Erik and Kelly for the record to avoid creating such monsters and yet, the flushie needs snaking every day soon after the post-caffeine effect.

Using a closet augur looked pretty self-explanatory, but I decided to check in with YouTube University and watch ‘the pros’ do it. I was fortunate to find a true Pro: Ramona’s Plumbing, a D.I.Y. plumbing site with 36 videos uploaded of Greg Chick, a licensed plumber in flipflops who walks you through fixing problems on a variety of topics including faucets, showers and yes, toilets.

I watched a 10:37 minute video of Greg dislodging a ‘soft blockage’ of intentionally placed, wadded paper towel. He was sensible and upbeat, but the bowl in the video was clean. The one I was working on was not. My tool was the poor cousin of the streamlined one Greg was using. So I opened the window wide, and with a burning candle and a wad of mugwort smoldering on the back of the tank, I swung the augur into the bowl and batted a foul. I closed the door and grabbed the phone. Fortunately, I managed to reach Erik and he coached me through my next attempt. My heart-rate jumped ugghing that augur coil into the tank. I yanked it out. There was a sloop. I flushed. Pooping in a bucket with sawdust ultimately feels more sanitary, sane and more manageable as very little can go wrong with such a simple system.

And now as I sit with cup of tea to write this, I just snaked toilet for the 6th time in three days. Sure I am glad to learn a new tool and this skill, as well earn some more insight to the workings of water toilets and yet, snaking a toilet is one of the more compelling arguments for why I ‘go dry’.

Considerations for abandoning your flushie (and switching over to the bucket):

1) Your body’s nutrient should be returned to the Source and by that I mean Mama Earth. This has always been the way. Now is the opportunity to revisit this connection.

2) Pooping into sawdust allows you to observe your waste an indicator of healthy body function. This is commonly understood in the medical community be it Western, Aruvedic or Chinese.

3) Humanwaste is a source of healthy soil if properly composted. (subset of consideration #1) It is sane and safe to compost your human waste if you are a competent (read: very experienced) composter of other organic waste and have the place to do so that will not create a nuisance (aka SMELL) for your neighbors or family.

4) Waste should not foul potable aka drinkable water.

5) Waste treatment plants use chemical and loads of energy (gas and electricity). Electricity by the way, depending how it is generated also uses large amounts of fresh water.

6) Greywatering your house is a much more enjoyable way to stretch into your plumbing fantasies than dealing with a clogged flush toilet.

7) Your water bill will plummet. Toilet’s account for 30% of our daily water useage.

8) It’s quiet. No one knows you are ‘using it’ even if you are on the phone.

In other words, Disconnect to Reconnect, folks.

Since I haven’t been able to convince the most thoughtful people I know to join the dry movement, I am investing in a closet augur and taking this show on the road.

Copyright 2011 Nance Klehm

illustration by Edie Fake

All organic waste is compostable. If it wasn’t, we’d be living amongst pile-ups. Compost is just a matter of how much time and energy it takes given the methods employed or the conditions the material is exposed to. This is the truth: everything comes into this world hungry and everything flows towards soil.

Soil is a body that supports plant growth. It is a structural mantle that supports many other things and transmits water. Soil is both decomposition engine and support network for all living things. It is the living sponge that filters our water and air, thereby cleaning them both. It stabilizes our constructions, prevents flooding, protects our landscapes against drought, and ensures the health of our food, water and air. Soil is not a thing. It is a web of relationships that stands in a certain state of a certain time. Compost is this too, but in a higher state of ignition. Chaos.

Recently I was asked one of the most exciting questions ever by a hospital in a developing country: “Could we use urine tainted with cholera as fertilizer?”

This is a hot question.

This is the same hospital that has a pit in the ground in which they toss placentas from mothers who give birth in the hospital. This pit was not made in order to ritualistically bury the placentas. It exists only because the placentas needed to be put somewhere else – in a different pit from the other human body castoffs, We can see this as a marking of specialties (if not also a factor of the number of births).

Public health systems everywhere are concerned with the elimination of waste — as an expense, both from their pocketbooks and in environmental terms. However, waste could be seen as a resource. The binary way of thinking gets broken down fast when resources and waste are redefined. The difference between me and the hospital is that they see their task as getting rid of waste after they take care of people. I see as this same task as compost production of the wastes in order to take care of people.

A very fine line exists between the fetid and the fecund.

Cholera: a disease that can indefinitely live in water. If people come in contact with cholera through drinking or washing, they could lose ten to twelve liters of liquid from their body in one day. This would lead, obviously, to dehydration, shock, and death within hours. When cholera hit urban populations in the United States in the early to mid nineteenth century, cities were inspired to create municipal waste water treatment systems.

And the placenta: a temporary organ that connects the developing fetus to the mother’s uterine wall to allow nutrient uptake, waste elimination, and gas exchange via mama’s blood supply. Placentas, when expelled by the body, can be healthy, bloody, jellyfish looking things; a concentrated bundle of vascular tissue that can be donated to a blood bank or incinerated into a crispy bit or dumped into a pit in the ground. It can be used to make a placenta print or eaten like a delicacy raw or cooked. That is, if the placenta is healthy. If it is deemed unhealthy (perhaps carrying Hepatitis B or C or HIV like any other human blood product), it can still escape being an ingredient in a stinky pit or burnt by being planted with a tree to nourish that tree’s roots.

Both of these pits, one with medical waste and one with placentas, waft their stink over the hospital’s grounds in a middle of a city. Pathogens exploit soils that don’t have abundant, diverse, and active microbes. In other words, pathogens are invited to run amok in most of our damaged soils.

This sort of question (though as disturbing as a bad compost heap or dump) is evidence of a disconnect. However, the question is easy enough to remediate. It comes from people who beg for a simpler answer which, when explained, will be embraced due to need. In other words, these people are humble enough and have to be practically engaged in the execution of these ideas. And in even more words, these people are post-theoretical.

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In contrast, my usual in-box questions concerning soils, composting, greywater and urban foraging read as if everyone is still confused about living processes of both landscape and body. The questions that I usually get asked exist and remain in the theoretical and are only partially engaged. They are motivated by idea instead of being responses to need. They spring from the head and lack a direct connection to the body. These questions have the tendency to turn into unhealthy messes into complicated disasters.

A few not-so-hot questions …

An off-grid couple – one, a graduate of biology, and the other of environmental studies (who met teaching an Outward Bound course) asked me if they should just pour off the bacteria-laden soup of their poo barrel, which they had left out under the clouds to feed right onto the ground because it “was stinking”.

Another woman in a shared apartment building with a tiny yard in the city asked me what the next step was. She had been collecting her poop in buckets and had them stacked in the garage. She had 24 of them at this point so it was apparent she had been diligent on her collection for some time (a bucket a week is the average, if you were wondering). The way she talked about the buckets, I realized she was trying to elicit praise from me.

The homeschooling parents who asked me if it was a good idea to dig their child’s potty trainer contents into the only sliver of ground that remained unpaved in their back yard (a.k.a., where the swing set sat).

And the inexperienced composter who wrote this to me: “We had an inspection done of the septic tank and it needs to be pumped. We’re talking maybe 1500 gallons of old raw sludgey sewage. I’m wondering: is there something we could do with this stuff on our site? Our land is all sand, and occasional yucca, etc, etc. I’m not sure if the pumper is legally allowed to offload it on to somewhere else on our grounds, but maybe he could be persuaded. Do we have it distributed all over? I guess I’d then add as much wood chips and/or straw and/or newspapers and/or yard waste as possible …? And water? Or is the stench gonna be just too much?”

Questions like these require rewiring.

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I am convinced that a healthy (defined as a diverse and abundant) soil biology can transform the organic waste and the otherwise pathogenic materials that we release into our environment. In rich places such as the U.S., it would be chemically treated using much energy and drinkable water, and in poor places, dumped into pits, vented, or not, or piled up and then covered by some other material (or not and left open for exploration by the curious). This transformed soil can become pathogen free, pathologically absent, damned nutritious and outright beautiful soil for food, medicine, and habitat for all us creatures. Allowing us to run barefoot, lick our fingers, and leave on the grit that sticks to a carrot we pull out of the ground.

And if we build this subterranean and surface habitat and work in community with it by pooping and peeing in a bucket and feeding our compost pile, planting fruit trees with our bloody rich placentas, and even embracing our rice water, if cholera-stricken … if we can opt to be antiheros and just plain caring and engaged, our habitat could be pretty dang groovy out there and we would all have better biceps and shoulders and hamstrings for it.

After all, WETNESS IS OPPORTUNITY.

Between Solstice and the last new moon of 2011, I emptied 225 gallons of human waste onto the humanure compost pile capping this year’s humble pile vintage 2011. The pile enters the winter measuring 15’ x 5’ x 3; or just short of 4.5 cubic yards which is roughly 5-6 small pick up truck’s worth.

By spring, the volume of this pile will be reduced by about 20-30% due to decomposition and evaporation. The sawdust that the waste is mixed with serves as the carbon for its nitrogen as well as a bulking agent for the end product.

Bottom left image: Cosmos inside a bin, Bottom right image: An orb of savory cabbage

I was given a lunch bag full of dirty Jerusalem artichoke roots a handful of years ago and now I have a stand that is at least 500 square feet. It is in the center of my food forest. The stand acts like a giant sponge to absorb the extra water that floods my growing area now the natural hydrology was interrupted by the nearby housing developer. The stand provides shade for toads and in wet times, muddy crayfish tunnel into the mud around its tubers. And in August, the flowers are 10’tall. Every spring, I dig out 30-50# of chokes from my ever expanding bed to keep them form overwhelming my young quince and apple trees, which they would if I didn’t.

Chokes are a delicious wild perennial food. Darn easy to grow, but can be a lot of work to dig and wash and are really tough to store well. They either mold or dry out quickly once out of the ground and even if I keep them nice and muddy, I haven’t had the luck or skill to store then over two weeks. In other words, use them or process them immediately.

I almost broke my mother’s Kitchen Aid when I tried to make Jerusalem artichoke flour, an answer to my father’s diabetes and new anti-gluten faddists. I sliced them, dried the slices and then tried to first use the Cuisine Art to chop them up. Wrong tool so I went to the mixer. It beat on and on for 10 minutes. I threw a towel over the top of the entire machine to keep the fine clouds of dust down. Indeed I got flour and as well as some hard bits which I sifted out. It was tasty, but given the work I had to do, I had to think of another approach. And this is coming from someone pretty intrepid athlete with food processing. Making sunchoke flour takes second place for me just after creating my own dried pectin from wild crab apple skins.

Muddy chokes and a few worms

Cleaning chokes

Washed chokes

How to build a non-code human waste collection system

I am talking about pooping into a bucket. Bucket toilets are commonly used by campers, boaters, and hunters. Unlike pit latrines, they prevent the leaching of raw waste into soil and waterways. Bucket toilets concentrate waste so it can be of use later as ‘humanure’, – a term popularized by Joseph Jenkins of The Humanure Handbook (Google it!). The advantages of bucket toilets are that the materials needed are entirely forgeable – plus its portability allows for traveling or on chance you need to hide it from the squeamish visitor or any visiting official. Bucket toilets are perfect for city dwellers. Just be aware that bucket dumps are not code, nor is the composting of your crap code, you will have to do this on the down low and do it well.

This is all you need: one of those ubiquitous food-grade 5 gallon plastic buckets obtained from the backdoor or dumpster of most restaurants. The second component is a carbon-rich cover material – usually sawdust or some other carbon source such as newspapers, cardboard, dried leaves, straw, or composted stable bedding (call a local stable). Sawdust and dry stable bedding are my favorite carbon sources for use as cover material, as they both absorb moisture well. The sawdust I use comes from a furniture maker who uses hardwoods and whose resulting dust waste doesn’t contain glues or resins. You should be able to find a woodworker who would gladly let you sweep his/her floors for your resource.

If you want to get snazzy, find a snap-on toilet seat for a 5 gallon bucket online or at a camping, hunting, or boating store. I built a box for my bucket so it is better stabilized under the weight of any body and hides the faded and torn ‘corn syrup’ label on my bucket. It is a simple box with a hinged lid with a waxed top. It fits nicely over the bucket and is comfortable to sit on, cleans well, etc. For those who need more of the ‘toilet look’, a toilet seat can always be attached to the lid.

To start your dry toilet, put a few inches of carbon material in the bottom of the bucket to absorb moisture. Use it in a way you would a normal toilet. Each time you make a deposit along with the toilet paper, cover it well with your carbon material. Repeat as necessary until you get a full bucket and add it to the middle of your backyard compost pile (or in the expressly reserved large lidded garbage can subtly tucked in the corner of your back porch) covering it up with more dry carbon material to prevent curious critters from getting to it and protecting it from losing too much moisture. The inherent bacteria of your waste and the carbon and nitrogen combo of your toilet and the compost pile will fire that mixture up to high temps pretty quickly. You’re on your way to making soil from your soil! Rinse your bucket with lightly soapy (biosoluble or biodegradable soap) water and dump into the compost. Begin again. If you don’t have a backyard area or storage area for this collection, you will have to rely on friends and neighbors that do or in the case of a few people I know, hide it in plain public space with signage declaring ownership, such as ‘Nance’s Compost’, as people won’t know what they are looking at with all that wet sawdust anyway.

Inhale deeply; it’s all going to be okay

If your toilet is stinky, attracting flies or harboring fly babies (aka maggots), the toilet is too wet. Use more cover material after each deposit.

If your compost pile is not heating up, your C:N ratio is off. Add more nitrogen in the form of urine, non-atrazine grass clippings, fruit and veggie peelings, etc. Your pile also may be dry; add water and cover lightly with a tarp or some burlap to prevent evaporation.

If your compost is stinky, it needs more oxygen. Incorporate dry material to create air space. Or if in a rainy climate, cover lightly with a tarp this time to repel rain from entering.

Dregs to gold

Believe me, after a few seasons, if you have set things up reasonably well your crap will have become lovely soil. If you remain unsure of your humanure composting skills and it has been a year, use the resulting compost to nourish some trees or flowering plants or simply wait a few more months or a year to allow it to age. If you are really nervous about trusting the thermophilic process to kill the pathogens, test your soil through your state’s land-grant university. The testing is affordable and will bring you a sense of ease, though shows that you are playing into the common mistrust of natural cycles.

Copyright 2008  Nance Klehm