Water is Precious, Poop is Priceless

by Rhona Mahony.  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared yesterday that an official state drought is parching California. We must cut back our usage of water by 20 percent. This afternoon, thinking carefully about how scarce water is in our state, and how many millions of dollars we spend to filter, chlorinate, pump, store, and argue about who gets which acre-feet of it, my question is, shall we continue to poop in it?

Pooping in our drinking water has, up until now, been a sensible strategy. I know that, historically, most people have pooped in their scarce resources. When earnings are low and wallets are slim, how many families have gathered their loose bills and coins in a basin and thriftily pooped on them? How many country folks and vacationers trapped in their cabins by impassable blizzards have stacked their canned beans, apples, and candy bars, and then, politely taking turns, have pooped on them? I can’t argue with history.

I would, though, like to offer a tidbit from prehistory, from those murky millennia B.W.C. That is, Before the Water Closet. In those old, old days, people pooped on the ground. Friendly bacteria and other teeny microbes ate up the droppings, composted it, and turned it into–you are not going to believe this–fertilizer!

Well, whatever am I thinking? We can’t all poop on the ground. That would be messy. Nope, instead, we can poop in dry toilets. These contraptions can compost human excretions, dry them to be collected and later composted, or keep urine and stool separate for different agricultural uses later. Thousands of people around the world are already using them. The city of Stockholm is experimenting with them on a municipal scale. Many towns and cities now collect and compost yard trimmings and food scraps. Adding human excretions, encapsulated nicely in colorful plastic bins, is not technically hard. It’s just–gack!–a new idea for some people.

The doo-doo’s and don’ts are laid out beautifully in Joe Jenkins’s book, The Humanure Handbook. The key is to compost the stool, the “humanure.” The heat of a compost pile full of thermophilic bacteria kills the disease-causing organisms that have rightly given “night soil” a scary reputation. So, don’t use your poop raw. Cook it. Rather, let the microbes that are eager to take care of your disposal problem cook it for you. They create the heat that kills the bad germs.

Municipal composting of human manure won’t only save millions of gallons of drinking water, it will give towns something they can sell: organic compost, rich in potassium, phosphorus, and nitrogen compounds. Synthetic fertilizer ingredients today have to be mined out of the ground or compounded up in gigantic ammonia plants. All because, duh.., we are throwing away our poop. Pee, too: the urine is where all the nitrogen is. It is clear that water is precious, but poop should not be priceless. It should have a price. It should be a commodity traded, bartered, bought, and sold. It makes good fertilizer.

You are intrigued now, I can tell. How can you become a humanure activist? First, talk to your town or city officials about composting. Move them along, from the most conventional sorts of composting to the newest. Get them to collect and compost cut grass and branches. Next, food scraps. They can learn from officials in San Francisco, Nova Scotia, and those other advanced places. Next, human excreta. You, and then they, can read Joe Jenkins’s book and his Humanure Headquarters materials.

In the meantime, you can try your own dry toilet at home. If you have room for a compost pile, you can add your own family’s excreta to it. A small, tightly enclosed plastic bin will not work. You need a large mass of well-aerated compost to create a home for thermophilic bacteria. Consider corralling a space roughly three feet–or one meter–wide on each side. These things are described on at least 14,000 Web sites.

The toilet is the fun part. Jenkins suggests a simplissimo sawdust toilet. Get several plastic five gallon buckets with tight fitting lids. Buy the Luggable Loo toilet seat and cover. Figure out how to get a regular supply of sawdust, ground paper, rice hulls, or other finely minced, carbon-rich, scoopable stuff. For many of us, that will be the hard part. A container of, say, sawdust, sits next to your five-gallon bucket that now has the toilet seat snapped onto it. Put several inches of sawdust in the bottom of the bucket. After each person uses the bucket, she covers her deposit with several inches of sawdust. When the bucket is full, its contents go on the compost pile, covered with grass or whatever carbon-rich items you are using there. I won’t belabor the instructions. Jenkins has put them online for free.

Liberate water! Create soil! What fun!