How to Build a Composting Toilet
If you are looking for a way to
lessen your ecological footprint and participate positively in solutions to
improve the environment, then you should seriously consider switching from a
flush toilet to a composting toilet system. Flush toilets waste enormous
amounts of water each year, but composting toilets operate with little or no
water and their end product (compost) is a valuable soil amendment as well.
However, one downside of switching
to composting toilets is that the manufactured brands can be quite expensive –
generally starting around $1500 for a basic, no-frills model. However, it
is possible to build a composting toilet on your own for well under $50 in materials.
Owner built (also called site built)
composting toilets are generally passive in design – meaning they rely on
natural instead of mechanical forces. Since they do not have a built in
electrical unit, they will need to be monitored more closely than manufactured
composting toilets and involve more labor in terms of their care and
maintenance (more on this below, in the section “How to Use Your New Composting
Toilet”). However, some would say that with this responsibility comes a
reward including an intimate knowledge of how your body is literally recycling
waste positively into the environment.
This project will only take a few
hours once all items needed to build it are assembled. The finished
composting toilet will be 18” wide and 21” long.
Materials You Will Need to Build a
Composting Toilet
- Four to five identical 5 gallon buckets with lids
- A standard sized toilet seat
- A hinged plywood top for the seat to rest on made of 3/4” plywood. The main portion of the top should measure 18” by 18”, attached with hinges to a 3”x18” board
- A box for the plywood top (and seat) to rest on, measuring 18 by 21 inches in width, and 10” deep. This can be built from two 10”x18”x1” boards and two 10”x21”x1” boards screwed together.
- Four legs to be attached to the box (3/4” x 3” x 12”) using screws (or a nail and hammer).
You will need to cut a top in the
plywood where the seat hole is (draw a circle to cut out using the seat as a
template on the top of the composting toilet). The hole should be set
about 1 ½ inches back from the front edge of the plywood. When
screwing or nailing the legs to the inside of the box, be sure that the top
edge of the box is about 1/2” below the top edge of the five gallon bucket, so
that the rim will sit tight against the underside of the toilet seat.
How to Use Your New Composting Bucket
How to Use Your New Composting Bucket
Now that you have finished your
composting toilet, it’s ready to use. Well, yes, technically, but there
are some additional materials you will need to keep the composting process in
order:
1) A Compost Bin. Unlike most
manufactured, active designs where the composting process takes place inside a
chamber attached to the toilet, when you build a composting toilet based on the
above passive design, you will have to transport it to a composting bin outdoors
for it to undergo the composting process.
You may want to locate this composting bin in your garden next to your normal garden composting pile, and you may need more than one bin if there are many people in your household. For more information about purchasing or building your own composting bin, visit The Composting Toilet Website.
You may want to locate this composting bin in your garden next to your normal garden composting pile, and you may need more than one bin if there are many people in your household. For more information about purchasing or building your own composting bin, visit The Composting Toilet Website.
2) Organic “Brown Matter.” This
will be used to cover your “deposits” when using the toilet in order to create
a balanced compost formula. This can be sawdust, peat moss, leaves, hay straw,
rice hulls or any other relatively dry and brown organic matter.
You want to ensure that your
composting toilet creates a nutrient-rich compost that is clean and odor-free
(this finished compost is often referred to as “humanure”). To create
this, you will need to ensure that whenever anyone uses the toilet, they
sprinkle the organic brown matter on top. The material in the bucket
should be moist, but not wet.
Once a bucket is fully, you will
need to transport it outside to your composting bin, while placing an empty
five gallon bucket in the toilet to replace the full one. In my
experience, people often wait until they have three or four full containers
(depending how many they have in reserve) to do all the emptying and cleaning
at once.
This is not a terribly pleasant task, although it is also not as unpleasant as you might imagine it to be as well. Be sure to cover the emptied waste with additional brown material, and to clean the buckets well so that no odors will linger. You should not need to turn this material, and it should compost on its own to create a rich humus material in six months to a year.
For additional information and articles about
composting toilets, please return to the Toilet
Composting Home Page.
I hope you have found this information about how to build a composting toilet
to be useful.
This is not a terribly pleasant task, although it is also not as unpleasant as you might imagine it to be as well. Be sure to cover the emptied waste with additional brown material, and to clean the buckets well so that no odors will linger. You should not need to turn this material, and it should compost on its own to create a rich humus material in six months to a year.
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