Life is complex and complicated. Unlike the days of early colonisation of our fair land. If each one of us were doing our bit in society to turn back time and slow the process of global warming we would be:
• Growing our own vegetables and fruits instead of paying farmers to deplete and destroy massive areas of land.
• Using our grey water from our sinks and showers to water our gardens.
• Using simple clivus maelstrom systems for our toilets
• Using rainwater collection tanks and dam water would be for secondary use only.
• Every household would be using solar water systems and solar power instead of electrical hot water and power or using renewable energy instead of green house gas emitting energy from burnt coal.
These are just a few examples of how we as human beings can be a little more responsible for our planet. All of the above is reasonably simple and quite achievable for the average house owner.
Unfortunately politics hasn’t quite caught up yet. In the not so distant past it was illegal to have household rainwater tanks. Does it have to take for us to be in the longest drought in living memory for things to change? I guess the answer is yes.
Why should we use a composting toilet?
Simple: to save water and to make natural fertilizer. Human waste when properly composted is a valuable, nutrient rich plant food! On average we flush 50,000 liters of water down the toilet every year. Every time we flush a toilet, we not only contaminate 19 litres of perfectly good drinking water, we also turn what could be valuable fertilizer into a toxic pollutant. To add insult to injury, a lot of us then turn around and pay for garden fertilizer and bottled water!
Using a composting toilet is a little different than using a flush toilet.
1. Do your business as you normally would. No foreign objects please. Toilet paper is fine.
2. Throw in a handful of carbonaceous material (for example, straw or sawdust)
3. Close the lid (it has a special seal, so it's really closed!)
4. Look around, perplexed, until you remember there is nothing to flush (you will naturally skip this step after a while.
Optimally, you created the compost by eating what came out of your garden... which means you've created a closed loop. That's the way it should be. CRADLE to CRADLE
www.deandi.com/adveanture/toilet www.weblife.org/humanure/chapter2_2.hmlt
3 comments:
Thanks Feona your blog is so informative and totally true in everyway... There are so many things we can do to stop climate change & support our environment. Paula
theres a vid in library called eco design. its a bit old though still inspiring. you'd love the biosphere. its what will mcdonnough was doing twenty years ago. before that there was buckminister fuller's dymaxian house. greed spoils things.
I'd love one of these dunnies. My nan and pop had an outhouse till about 1983.
I've seen this model in one of our national parks around here.
jo
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