Composting Toilet Design

Growing from underground: Permaculture enters mainstream

As a way to save the world, digging a ditch next to a hillock of sheep dung would seem to be a modest start. Granted, the ditch was not just a ditch. It was meant to be a "swale," an earthwork for slowing the flow of water down a slope on a hobby farm in western Wisconsin.

And the trenchers, far from being day laborers, had paid $1,300 to $1,500 for the privilege of working their spades on a cement-skied Tuesday morning in late June.

Fourteen of us had assembled to learn permaculture, a simple system for designing sustainable human settlements, restoring soil, planting year-round food landscapes, conserving water, redirecting the waste stream, forming more companionable communities and, if everything went according to plan, turning the earth's looming resource crisis into a new age of happiness.

It was going to have to be a pretty awesome ditch.

That was the sense I took away from auditing four days of a weeklong Permaculture Design Certificate course led by Wayne Weiseman, 58, director of the Permaculture Project, in Carbondale, Ill.

The movement's founders, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, coined the term permaculture in the mid-1970s, as a portmanteau of permanent agriculture and permanent culture.

In practice, permaculture is a growing and influential movement that runs deep beneath sustainable farming and urban food gardening. You can find permaculturists setting up worm trays and bee boxes, aquaponics ponds and chicken roosts, composting toilets and rain barrels, solar panels and earth houses.

Truly, permaculture contains enough badges of eco-merit to fill a Girl Scout sash. Permies (yes, they use that term) like to experiment with fermentation, mushrooming, foraging (also known as wildcrafting) and herbal medicine.

Yet permaculture aims to be more than the sum of those practices, said David Cody, 39, who teaches the system and creates urban food gardens in San Francisco.

"It's an ecological theory of everything," Cody said. "Here's a planet Earth operating manual. Do you want to go along for a ride with us?"

It's hard to say just how many have climbed aboard the mother ship. In San Francisco, Cody saw more than 1,500 volunteers turn out in 2010 to create Hayes Valley Farm, a pop-up food garden near the site of a collapsed freeway ramp.

"I like to say it was the largest sheet-mulching project ever done in the world," said Cody, who designed the garden following the permaculture principles and directed the process of covering the ground with a cardboard weed barrier and organic material.

Composting Toilets And Systems - Permaculture Design Courses

Technically, a "composting toilet" is a toilet in which composting takes place. Usually, the composting chamber is located under the toilet. Other toilets are simply collection devices in which humanure is deposited, then removed to a separate composting location away from the toilet area. These toilets are components of "composting toilet systems," rather than composting toilets, per se . Humanure composting toilets and systems can generally be divided into two categories based on the composting temperatures they generate. Some toilet systems produce thermophilic (hot) compost; others produce low-temperature compost. Most commercial and homemade composting toilets are low-temperature composting toilets, sometimes called "mouldering toilets." The most basic way to compost humanure is simply to collect it in a toilet receptacle and add it to a compost pile. The toilet acts only as a collection device, while the composting takes place at a separate location. Such a toilet requires little, if any, expense, and can be constructed and operated by people of simple means in a wide range of cultures around the world. It is easy to create thermophilic (hot) compost with such a collection toilet. This type of toilet is discussed in detail in Chapter 8, "The Tao of Compost." The toilets of the future will also be collection devices rather than waste disposal devices. The collected organic material will be hauled away from homes and composted under the responsibility of municipal authorities, perhaps under contract with a private sector composting facility. Currently, other recyclable materials such as bottles and cans are collected from homes by municipalities; in some areas organic food materials are also collected and composted at centralized composting facilities. The day will come when those collected organic materials will include toilet materials. In the meantime, homeowners who want to make compost rather than sewage must do so independently by either constructing a composting toilet of their own, buying a commercial composting toilet, or using a simple collection toilet with a separate composting bin. The option one chooses depends upon how much money one wants to spend, where one lives, and how much involvement one wants in the compost-making process.

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