July 2015
It
might have started 60 years ago when George Humphris said something
about "starving the drains of water". Sewers need a flow of water, at
a slight angle downward from horizontal, to keep things moving along.
There had been a drought for weeks, and a radio personality, Ted
Moult, talked about putting a brick in the WC cistern to save water:
Prince Phillip had made a comment about using two gallons of drinking
water to flush away a pint of urine or half a pound of faeces.
George
Humphris was, for a while, a dairy farmer. His cattle produced
milk, urine and faeces. The first he sold, of course; there was a
great demand. But the second and third were not waste products: they
were a valuable resource which kept his land fertile and the grass
growing.
At
one time lavatorial flushing water was drained into the sea, without
any treatment. Now (2015) it's settled to remove the solids,
oxygenated to remove as many chemicals as possible, chlorinated to
kill pathogens and then recycled as drinking water. It has been said
that the Thames passes through seven people before it gets to the sea.
(In Cambridge the effluent is pumped into the River Cam whence it drains directly into the
sea.)
Even so, we end
up drinking chlorine; enough progesterone (excreted by women taking
contraceptive pills) gets past the purification process that record
numbers of British men are being feminized, partially sterilized and
getting
gynecomastia.
To paraphrase Joseph Jenkins "Why do we still defaecate into our drinking water?"
On
a visit to Sweden in the 1960s John and Margaret were given tea by a
young man building his own house. He had built into the house a
"waterless lavatory". The concept struck a chord in two people
interested in sanitation, sewerage, and compost! It's all about bacteriology.
Then,
fifty years later, the "flushing" lavatory on the narrowboat began to
give up. In reality, its waterpipes had become furred with
limescale, and it no longer rinsed the bowl properly. If the pump
pressure was increased, the pipe joints tended to part: if the
pressure was reduced, the lavatory would not rinse properly!
Its plywood plinth had begun to disintegrate and looked nasty.
There
was no way to know how clean (or, more accurately, how unclean) the
holding tank had become. It was tedious to empty and to rinse.
The problem was not helped by a tenant who never learned to use it properly.
Surely there was a better way?
Several subscribers to the
Wooden Boat Forum had begun to write about "waterless closets" and "composting toilets".
Chapter
8 (The Tao of Compost) described in detail how to build and maintain a
waterless toilet, and how to compost human manure and urine for use in
the garden.
It should
be noted that urine from a healthy person is sterile: it contains no
bacteria, pathogenic or otherwise. Shortly after excretion, bacteria
from the air contaminate stored urine and use the nitrogenous chemicals
for their own growth. The infected urine smells, often strongly.
Faeces
from a healthy person, by contrast, is full of (one might say almost
entirely composed of) bacteria. They have turned undigested food into a
state suitable for elimination from the body. Of the
400 or more species of bacterium present most are perfectly harmless in the
bowels of the person from which they came, but some of them are
dangerous, even deadly, in the mouth and stomach of the same person or
other people.
StJohn
is a keen kayaker and canoeist; he has been a keen climber. He often
camps in wild places, and carries a small trowel to dig a hole for his
faeces: all wild campers do this. Covered with a layer of soil and
grass, no faeces are visible to offend the eyes; no
smells escape to offend the nose. More than that, many of the micro-
and mini- beasts in the soil enjoy the nitrogen and digest the faecal
bacteria, destroying the pathogens along with all the others. These
beasts include beetles, worms, fungi and soil-bacteria. Within days
the buried faeces have been consumed and anything which remains is
humus; that black gold for which gardeners build and maintain
compost
heaps. By burying them, StJohn and his wild-camping friends compost
their faeces. Their sterile urine simply soaks into the ground: its
fluid waters the plants and its nitrogen nourishes them.
Compost,
and its main constituent, humus, are valuable resources. If our
faeces and urine can be turned into compost why do we use drinking water
to flush them to waste?
Perhaps the answer to the narrowboat question was a
dry toilet, similar to that described by Joseph Jenkins?
August 2015
A single 25L plastic bucket arrived from
Amazon. £8.55
The instructions say that 4 are needed, but let's start with one.
The seat came from B&Q. £12.50
Needed to be chosen carefully, as not all seats are flat underneath.
None of them have supports which can be twisted. Cut off one of the pins and turn them.
The hinges also came from B&Q.
Plywood from Ridgeons. 3/4" (18mm) birch exterior ply. Wow! £86
It arrived on Friday, and was cut into the right sized pieces within an hour or two.
More than half left over for another project, so, say £30?
Construction ply would have done the job and would have been cheaper.
A flour scoop came from Amazon (actually, from China).
It took two days to assemble and paint.
Sawdust is not easy to get, but compost (astonishingly) is free. Nip up the A10 to Amey Cespa's recycling place, turn left at the first roundabout, then right at the second and help yourself!
Margaret volunteered to try it in her bathroom.
She said it was very comfortable: just the right height.
She used it almost exclusively for five days. No offensive sights or smells, and no flies. The only smell is the slightly earthy, natural smell of the compost.
When the bucket was full, it was emptied into the outdoor compost bin. Then the whole thing was moved into the instigator's bathroom. He, too, found it comfortable and easy to use, and used it exclusively for over a week.
Only when both Margaret and John are happy will the system on the narrowboat be changed.
