Humanure!
This past week here at Empty Mountain, we converted our pit style latrine into a composting toilet set up, and went from a tarped tee-pee structure to a USB-walled outhouse, equip with 2 windows and a hinged door. We’re all about slow & steady systems improvements here at EM :)
Our good friend Nikolay turned us onto what’s called humanure, which is the process of converting human waste into compost. We purchased the definitive guide on such matters, The Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, and just got up and running a few days ago.
The basics involve: depositing waste (poop, urine & toilet paper) into a 5-gallon bucket; covering the waste each time after use with sawdust; waiting until you have a few full buckets; placing the contents of the buckets into a specifically designed compost bin; then covering the contents with an appropriate cover material, such as straw or hay. Cover material is key, according to the book. As long as you cover the contents inside the toilet AND inside the bin with the appropriate type and amount of material, it will be an entirely smell-free & bug/critter-free system.
We’ll be building a wooden unit for the bucket to slide into soon, which will have a regular toilet seat lid hinged to the casing, in order to have a sturdier set up that’s more user friendly for EM visitors, but for now we’re just using a bucket with a plastic clip-on toilet seat, camp style. Our composting bin is set up and ready for its first deposit, which we’ll make after we fill 3 or 4 buckets up. My understanding is that on average, one person will fill one 5-gallon bucket up per week.
In brief, the compost bin is sized for accepting waste deposits for one year (and actually, two bins are needed). After a year, that bin is then left untouched to sit and process for another year, before it’s ready to be used as compost. So once you get started, it’ll be two years before you have your first load of usable compost. While the one bin is processing, you start another bin (hence the need for two bins).
We ordered a 20” compost thermometer to help keep track of our humaure temps. From my understanding of what I’ve read so far, as long as the thermometer is showing that the temp inside the compost bin is warmer than the ambient air outside of it, the process needed to turn human waste into compost is happening. Apparently, once the year of untouched curing takes place, you’ll know it’s ready to use as compost once the thermometer reading from inside the pile matches the outside temperature. But I’m still in learning mode, so don’t quote me.
I think a large majority of those who do the humanure set up are likely gardeners. Translation: they’re actually using the compost they’re making. Us? Well. Despite what many folks assume, we’re not really into gardening. I mean, we dig gardens (pun intended) and all, but we’re not, like, gardeners. A number of years ago, we gave it a go. Mike spent loads of time making a garden spot in our backyard when we lived in Missoula. We planted a number of different vegetables over the course of a few grow seasons. But it was during this process that we learned: Oh, we’re not really into gardening. We all make different choices about what we want to do with our days, and turns out, gardening isn’t one of the things that we want to invest our time & energy into. So our humanure will simply be spread around the woods of EM.
In the interest of wanting to live simply, and have a land-friendly system for waste disposal, humanure is relatively easy for us to engage with, especially given the fact that we don’t have an on-site water supply. Sure there’s a bit of labor involved, which includes needing to keep a good beat on sourcing cover materials, but hopefully, once we start using our new sawmill, we’ll have all the sawdust we need. And straw bales are easy enough to come by. We’ll see how it goes!
Onward and onward, one small step at a time. Humanure here we come!
