videos172: The Pee and Poo Show
Laura Allen gives an intimate tour of a home-built composting toilet in her Bay Area urban home. The nutrient-rich composted “humanure” is used to enrich the lush, edible landscape, and doesn’t waste precious drinking water like flush toilets. The co-founder of Greywater Action shows the throne-like toilet compartment whose distinctive feature is a urine diverter. Pee and poop are collected in separate containers beneath the toilet, and are accessed outside the house. Sterile pee is watered in at the base of plants, while poop is collected in barrels and aged for a year or more until it has composted fully. What a way to go! (www.greywateraction.org). Listen to Audio. Read Janaia’s blog about taping this show.
May 31st, 2010 at 6:53 pm
Great conversation! This episode is a wonderful complement to your award-winning grey-water episode. Thanks for giving such a detailed perspective into this unreasonably taboo subject!
June 2nd, 2010 at 8:20 am
[…] DIY Composting Toilets and Humanure: The Pee & Poop Show (Video) Image credit: Peak Moment TV […]
June 2nd, 2010 at 8:23 am
[…] TreeHugger on June 2, 2010 Image credit: Peak Moment TV It’s been called creepy by some, but my obsession with pee and poop is not without good reason. […]
June 2nd, 2010 at 8:23 am
[…] Image credit: Peak Moment TV […]
June 7th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
This was really worth the wait. It really is a shame that we in the “civilized” world just flush all that valuable manure and urine (and water) down the toilet. I am reading a book “Just Enough” which decribes life in Tokugawa era Japan (1650 to 1850). Night soil was an important resource and farmers would go to the cities to collect it. This also prevented cholera outbreaks that often afflicted Europe. Farmers would even build public toilets along roadways to encourage passers-by to leave a “deposit.” As our petroleum and chemical-based agriculture becomes more and more difficult to sustain, we will have to begin using “humanure” again. Unfortunately, I would have a divorce on my hands if I tried to start such a system in our household.
June 9th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
Bravo to you. I copied some of the virtues of a composting toilet from Australia, and built it for a house we built in Tijuana. It was labor intensive and expensive for me to build. You have taken a much more eco friendly approach, but I would suggest something different for your pipe that exhausts to the roof. I cannot come up on the 19th, because I will be in Tijuana building another house for a poor family. I will forward your idea to the priests in TJ.
I also have a gray water system in the planning/production stage to reuse gray water for showers, washing clothes, cars, garden. I have to pay a lot of money to produce the idea, but hopefully it will be on the market in a few years.
Congratulations to you.
John P. Moore
San Jose, Ca. 95112
June 9th, 2010 at 9:59 pm
I talked to a gentleman in Australia who has had a composting toilet in his house now for over 20 years. He says that his house smells sweeter than houses with a conventional flushing toilet. Canada has installed composting toilets in apartments that are several stories tall.
June 10th, 2010 at 5:14 am
Thank you, Laura. Moving from “flush and forget” to awareness of entirely new possibilities is our challenge. You have gotten us off to a great start.