Let’s Talk About Poop & Pee! (It’s Actually An Important Cleantech Issue) – CleanTechnica

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One of the great things about flush toilets is that you don’t have to worry much about what happens next. You flip the handle, some water moves around, and the mess is gone. You have to clean the toilet periodically, and you might occasionally have to call the plumber, but beyond that it’s just not your problem anymore. Sadly, what happens next is a real problem.

First off, let’s talk a bit about how sewage systems work.

In cities and in other places with a sewer system, all pipes once led to the river. This had the upside of getting the waste out of the city, but had the downside of contaminating the river. People downstream obviously weren’t happy with this arrangement, and it caused all sorts of environmental problems. In some cases, especially when large lakes or the ocean were involved, the effluent could even find its way back into the water system, sickening the population.

This was solved by adding treatment to filter out the water and divert the sludge to landfills, but existing sewer systems were already in place. So, the treatment plant simply got added to the system near the river or ocean/lake outlet. The downside to this is that many systems combined stormwater and sewage into one set of pipes.

This has the unfortunate effect of causing many people to get sick when it rains, as the pipes overflow and dump effluent into the river! Research has shown that many “stomach bugs” “go around” after rainstorms, so there’s a good chance that you’ve been sickened by a sewage system at some point (if not many times). So, yes, this is actually a very serious environmental problem.

Off-grid solutions to human waste management often aren’t great, either. For homes away from sewer systems, septic systems are the most common alternative. All of the effluent goes into an underground vault with leach lines on the other side (pipes with a bunch of holes). This lets the solid waste sink into the vault while liquid waste goes out of the lines, through the holes, and into a gravel bed before seeping out into the ground. The solids then naturally get broken down by bacteria and decompose, pushing out gas and liquid through the leach lines.

These systems work pretty well when there aren’t too many systems in a small area and they aren’t too close to a body of water. But, when there are too many of them or they leak into a stream, river, or lake, they can cause problems for the environment and for human health. Leaky, broken, or badly-maintained systems can cause similar if not worse problems.

Mobile toilets can be an even bigger pain in the butt. RVs and other vehicle-mounted toilets often simply keep the effluent in a “black tank.” When the tank gets full, it has to be dumped into a sewer or septic system for processing. This means extra stops and expense for RV owners who don’t regularly plug the sewer line in at a campground, and it’s pretty easy to mishandle a sewer hose and get poop on you. Sewer hoses from these vehicles can also leak or clog, creating more management problems. I’ve known several people who have gotten raging digestive sickness dealing with these systems.

Even further off-grid, campers in tents and hikers can even be a problem in busy areas. Digging a hole, pooping in it, and covering it with dirt is okay when someone does it once a month. However, when 100 people are doing this near a campsite in a day, you start running into problems finding a place to dig without finding others’ poop and the overall number of poops in these shallow holes can start contaminating the environment. So, many places like national parks are requiring people to bring along bags or otherwise pack their poop out.

Finding Better Solutions

Before we can find good alternatives, we need to talk about effluent a little more. If you have dogs and a big yard they can run in, you’ve probably noticed that their poops don’t stink that bad, especially after a few hours. The poops dry up, the bacteria stop reproducing, and the smell eases up. What this shows us is that a mix of pee and poop is a lot more problematic than poop alone.

So, ideally, what we need to do is separate the two in the bathroom. Composting toilets are a great way to do this, as they’re already built to separate the two out using a funnel in the front and a chute in the back for poop to drop into. This type of toilet doesn’t work great for standing to pee, but a standalone urinal that goes into a similar pee tank can solve that problem, allowing men to keep doing what they’re accustomed to doing.

Going to the bathroom requires a tiny bit more work than a normal toilet when using one of these. The pee tank must be emptied before it gets full, but it can be emptied in many more places without causing environmental harm. Existing sewer systems would be a lot easier to manage if all there was in the lines was pee. The poop box needs to have a biodegradable drying media dumped in after each use (peat moss, coconut shavings, and many other things work great), and the box needs to be emptied when it gets too full. The poop plus the drying media can be safely deposited in the trash (like a dirty diaper), or it can be composted if you have access to a high-temperature composting setup.

This might sound like a lot of work, but you eliminate the need for plunging, calling a plumber, and otherwise needing to do big maintenance on home sewer systems. Away from cities, big savings can be achieved by avoiding a septic system altogether or avoiding the need to visit dump stations or otherwise deal with black tanks in RVs.

Most importantly, though, eliminating effluent from the sanitation ecosystem means a lot less people would get sick every year and the environment would suffer fewer problems. That alone is worth a little extra effort when going to the bathroom.

Images: My Trelino portable composting toilet. Images by Jennifer Sensiba.