If you had asked me my thoughts on composting human waste a few years ago I would have looked at you like you had lobsters crawling all over your face (A Christmas Story reference for the cool kids). But, here we are, living off-grid, in Northern New Mexico, using a compost toilet that we created ourselves.

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To get things started, credit goes where it is due: The Humanure Handbook 4th Edition: Shit in a Nutshell by Joseph Jenkins was our main resource for tackling this shitty problem. We needed to figure out how to avoid running once a week back to a campground to empty black and grey tanks, fill up our water tank, and top off our batteries with shore power. So, obviously, or perhaps not so obviously to some, I started looking at "composting toilets" that I have seen in the full-time RV community and Skoolie community. Particularly, the Nature's Head Self-Contained Composting Toilet, with the whopping price tag of just under $1000.

Considering what I knew about the experiences my fellows have had with the toilet, I was hesitant to say the least. That's a hefty bill just for somewhere to put your waste... and then the next question is, what do you do with the waste once it's "self-contained". I had heard others say they dump the urine away from people on open land, and that didn't seem great to me. I also read that others have to find a septic system to dump their solid waste into and that wasn't going to work for us. I wondered... how is this compost if you need a sewer? So, I went to the reviews section for the Amazon product and saw people referring to the "Humanure Handbook" and the "5 gallon system". So, I decided to look into that.

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Well, without going deeply in to the history, the science, the research, and the shitty details, let's summarize the book by Mr. Jenkins by saying, you can basically compost any waste- human or animal, with food waste- any food waste (no more separating out meat, bones, dairy, etc.) and turn it into good, clean, food garden ready soil. It just takes time.

Within the contents of the book, Jenkins offers a design template for building a toilet that houses a 5 gallon bucket into which you do your business. You cover it with a carbon based material to prevent odors and provide a composting substance for everything to break down. He recommends keeping 5 buckets (with lids), and when 4 of them are full, you add them to your compost heap. There are also plans for how to build the compost container in the book. Basically, you dig into the middle of the heap, dump in the nasty, add in anything else you want to compost, cover the heap and walk away. You keep doing that once a week or so for a year, then you start a second heap. While you add to the second heap, the first gets an entire year to really "cure" before it is used. Given the time, everything nasty should be broken down and all you should have left behind is fertile composting soil. Again, this is simplified and he goes into a great deal more detail in the book. But, once you have the two pile system in place, you just alternate between them - using the good compost when it's cured, then refilling the heap with another year of goodies.

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So far so good! We have filled one bucket since we started using the system. We have animal bedding that we are using as our carbon cover for the time being because we want to try using the sage brush we have cleared from our land, but we can't find a wood chipper for sale anywhere. But, all told, between the toilet we built and the materials we acquired to cover the contents of the bucket, we spent less than $80. There's no smell, we have been adding in kitchen scraps which I like because it's reducing our accumulation of garbage considerably, and it's just simple. You'd think it would be weirder to use, but we basically adjusted to it in seconds and haven't thought twice about it. Our next project will be to figure out where to set up the compost heap and build that out. I'm excited to see how it does over time, and I'm also laughing a lot imagining how we will potty train Devin on a compost toilet and he will be so confused by standard toilets when facing them.

So, that's where we are with this particular adventure- I'll be happy to answer any potential questions to the best of my ability based on our limited first hand experience right now. I'll probably be writing something up in the near future to talk about other ways we are trying to reduce waste based on the principles of Bea Johnson in her amazing book, Zero Waste Home.

Humanure on our Off-Grid Property

Learning Shit

But Does it Work?