Getting Hooked
When I get hooked on something, I pretty much research the heck out of it. That’s been the case with the practice of composting and my new composting toilet that I’ve been using from OGO Toilet in Ohio. My RV buddies laugh when I write about toilets, but I’m not the one putting gloves on to empty my black water tank while breathing in the wafting fumes of their own do-do.
If I think about it, in my Boy Scout days, we dug our latrines and sprinkled dirt on it for the next guy to use. Obviously, composting has improved in methods and material used. I doubt hauling a pile of dirt in my RV will ever happen, but the Coconut coir (the fluffy ground husk of the coconut) is light and does the trick very well. When you separate urine, and the other, there typically is little smell in the toilet, thus allowing you to use it 25-30 times before emptying it.
Wasting Water
If you ponder that for a moment, be reminded that you use perfectly good drinking water to flush your RV or home toilet. When people are talking about climate change, sustainable resources and Eco-mindedness constantly being drilled into our heads, why aren’t we treating our human waste like other organic material?
I spend a lot of time putting my fallen leaves and yard refuse in our green bin, household waste in there too, but none of us think of our own by-products once we flick the flush on the toilet.
Fighting Disease
The World Health Organization estimates that there are more than 2 billion people without toilet access in the world. In some major world cities, you will find their solution when you walk their smelly streets. It’s not just disgusting, but 430,000 people die each year from dysentery, cholera and other dreadful diseases associated with poor hygiene. There has to be something to help these people.
While I love the British Isles, I wouldn’t have believed that they would be leading the way in composting on a large scale.
A well-known music festival held each year in the UK (Glastonbury) placed scoops and a barrel of sawdust outside their portable toilets in 2014 and concert goers never thought anything of picking up the scoop and throwing a bit of sawdust after they had done their business. The raw material was then sent to local farms to finish the composting process.
According to the Journal of Bioresource Technology, composting has come a long way in recent years from the common heaps of decaying waste to smart, artificial intelligence-assisted reactor composting. What I got from the review is that Bio-waste is the most abundant contributor to the municipal solid waste stream, particularly in low and middle-income countries (Kaza et al., 2018).
Friendly to the Environment
Composting is an environmentally friendly and effective method for recycling organic waste into stable and mature fertilizers. People are, just now, getting past the yuck factor of composting our own waste. As Glastonbury showed us, people will change their habits when given an effective alternative.
When you look at the range of toilets offered to Rvers you will quickly see the trend is moving to composting. The challenge is to try alternatives. When the RV owner flushes their toilet the waste is ‘gone’ but it’s not forgotten. When it comes time to empty the putrid mass, they are suddenly reminded about alternatives and how there must be a better way – there is!
I love my OGO composting toilet!
Composting Trends
