Humanure?

[Eric]

There's a great story about composting toilets on time.com. We once spent a few days in a cabin in Wyoming that had a composting toilet and it's true, a big pile of crap has no odor when it's done right. Hard to believe, but true. Here's the story:

For a well over a decade, 57-year-old roofer and writer Joseph Jenkins has been advocating that we flush our toilets down the drain and put a bucket in the bathroom instead. When each bucket in his five bathrooms is full, he empties it in the compost pile in his backyard in rural Pennsylvania. Eventually he takes the resulting soil and spreads it over his vegetable garden as fertilizer. "It's an alternative sanitation system," says Jenkins, "where there is no waste." His 255-page Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, is in its third edition and has been translated into five languages, but it has only recently begun to catch on. His message? Human manure, when properly managed, is odorless. His audience? Ecologically committed city dwellers who are looking to do more for the earth than just sort their trash or ride a bike to work.

[Cookie]

The Sugar Loaf Volunteer Fire Dept. (Boulder, CO) doesn't own the land its building is sitting on, so no improvements can be made. The only water in the building is in a water cooler. The composting toilet works just fine and is odorless. On Garage Sale days every year, hundreds of visits make no difference: the room remains odor-free. It's a great solution. They have also been used in the AMC huts on the Appalachian trail for decades.