Using Composting Toilets to Save Water and Add Sustainability to Your Homestead

Reader Contribution by Mary Lou Shaw

It’s important to my husband and me to make our small farm as sustainable as possible. Composting toilets are the perfect fit for sustainability because they don’t use water. We want our farm to project different values than those that allow the immense use of water by Ohio’s ethanol plants, big agriculture and fracking. In this article, I’ll discuss our two years’ experience with composting toilets.

Composting toilets save water: Older toilets use as much as five to seven gallons-per-flush (GPF) of water. Although newer toilets cannot use more than 1.6 GPF, and high-efficiency-toilets use 1.28 GPF, that’s still a lot of drinkable water going down the drain. Compost toilets use zero water because there is no flushing. I discuss below what happens to the waste.

Besides saving water, it’s convenient to install a toilet in a cabin, boat or RV without connecting it to a septic system. We did this in an RV to allow farm apprentices to have private housing a distance from our home.

Composting toilets are Sustainable: The problem associated with composting toilets is usually how to safely dispose of human waste. What has nature always done with animal waste? It composts it, of course. And that is what we do on our farm.

Being a former physician, I recognize the potential dangers of fecal contamination to human drinking water and food. Let’s examine how we can deal with this safely.

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