PROTECTING YOUR SKIN
To protect your skin from the sun, use sunscreen when your shadow is shorter than you are. — Anonymous
To protect your skin from the sun, use sunscreen when your shadow is shorter than you are. — Anonymous
10/9/15To protect your skin from the sun, use sunscreen when your shadow is shorter than you are. — Anonymous
10/9/15A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted.
Tell us what you love.Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, and the links to them may or may not work. We present these vintage recommendations as is because the possibilities they inspire are new. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox.
Humanure Handbook Sawdust Composting Toilet
Everything you could possibly want to know about recycling human waste is found in the third edition of the Humanure Handbook.
In addition this heroic book tells you how to make your own small homemade composting toilet using 5-gallon buckets and a regular toilet seat, and how to compost the deposits usefully. This can be used for an emergency toilet, for a cabin, or in a motor home, or for everyday use if you have a garden. One of the videos on the book’s website details the clever idea of how a music festival used sawdust toilets instead of porta-potties to much relief.
The book is also available as free PDFs; the chapter on building your own sawdust toilet is Chapter 8. — KK
After using composting toilets on a few sailboats and one in a relative’s cabin, I would say they are all prone to smells, breakage and disappointment. EXCEPT for the DIY five-gallon sawdust bucket described in the Humanure Handbook. Nothing to go wrong. I’ve never had a smell issue either in the toilet or the compost pile. It requires a little bit of ongoing effort, but in my opinion this is ‘positive’ maintenance as opposed to negative maintenance when any other toilet breaks down. As an added bonus the bucket can be built into an attractive box to match the style and material of your space and looks far better than almost any toilet on the market including water closets. — Mackey McLelland
I have used this sawdust composting toilet for 10 years now without problems. There really is nothing to have a problem with. I originally envied a neighbor who had shelled out for one of the big production composting toilets. It broke in less than two years (an important mechanical part of the ‘tumbler’ was poorly designed and failed). He was left with a couple hundred pounds of incompletely composted humanure in his house. To say that he was unhappy is an understatement. He has used a sawdust toilet since then. In short, unless local regulations require a production toilet (increasingly they do not) a sawdust toilet is the way to go.
A couple of suggestions: use wood pellets if you find sawdust hard to come across; they quickly turn to sawdust. Don’t turn your humanure compost piles just leave them…for years. They will take care of themselves. You can find instructions for a sawdust toilet on line easily. It is embarrassingly simple and much more hygienic (even though most people’s first reaction, including mine, is, “Ewwww.”).
The sawdust toilet also provides a perfect emergency toilet (for hurricanes, power outages, etc) Just keep a 5 gallon bucket, 2 lids, and a bag of wood pellets in a closet. Cut a salad plate sized hole in one of the lids for use as a ‘seat’ and put the other over it to ‘close the lid’. Just make sure to dispose of the humanure responsibly after the emergency. — Rob Groesbeck
This is the definitive source on composting crappers, from why to how, and yes, the scatological humor abounds. Yet this is a serious issue. Biosolids are recycled and used in the U.S. and around the world by governments and municipalities, and not always in the most responsible ways. Jenkins gives you the knowledge to do it yourself and do it responsibly. The entire contents of this comprehensive guide are available as a free PDF download, and the Jenkins Publishing site offers up instructional videos, too. Very helpful when I constructed my own bucket toilet. — Erik Knutzen
I grew up with a Carousel composting toilet in our house. It works well, Draining the urine, using a scoop of sawdust every time, and the occasional insertion of beneficial bacteria, all help prevent odors. We had a 12V fan, as well. Two years is the recommended time for between deposition and cleaning. We used it as our primary family toilet for over 15 years, before my father no longer wanted to clean it. It never broke down, and never had any issues. It can handle a whole family year round.
For individuals or occasional vacation use, I’d recommend the Sun-Mar standard Excel. — Courtney Ostaff
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