We have a composting toilet

The toilet, the toilet. There’s no ignoring the toilet. When we told everyone we were moving to Pähkinä, the indoor composting toilet caused about as much excitement as our lakeside location. Here I should admit to my own extreme ignorance on the topic—at the time. I’d encountered outhouses while traveling, but I’d never given them much thought. Using them was bad enough and, to my mind, the outhouse was nothing but an archaic nuisance, a sort of carthorse of a toilet. Then I came to modern, sleek Finland, where, my gosh, there are composting toilets everywhere. At rest stops, at summer cottages, in national parks. And they’re clean. They don’t stink! These commodes were no relatives of the exposed cinder block loo, stacked none-too-convincingly above a peak of human waste, that I’d once mounted in a certain unnamed country. But even in Finland my experience of composting toilets remained confined to relatively out-of-the-way places, and I never really considered what it would mean to have one in our home. Where does all the yuck go? Who empties it? In our case it turned out that the answers to those questions were “the backyard” and “we do.”

There are many different types of composting toilets on the market. (Heather at The Greenest Dollar has a great overview of them here, and you should also take a look at the composting toilet bible, The Humanure Handbook.) Ours is a simple, custom-made system that consists of four 80-liter buckets which rest on a rotating, wooden carousel located in an underground chamber. Inside the bucket chamber is a fan, connected to a ventilation pipe that leads into our chimney, which whisks away any unpleasant odors (though this is mostly managed by the addition of cover material). The generous size of the buckets means that we step up to sit on an otherwise ordinary toilet seat which is placed directly above the bucket in use. When that bucket is full, we simply rotate the carousel to a fresh one. Once all the buckets are full, we access the chamber through an outside trapdoor and empty the contents onto a designated compost heap.

It’s easy, it’s odorless, it’s clean. We’re total converts! Conventional toilets are such an expected and ordinary part of life in the West that it’s no wonder we seldom question the logic of defecating into gallons of precious drinking water every day. We should.

I’ll do a step-by-step guide to maintaining the system the next time we empty the buckets. In the meantime, please let me know your questions and thoughts so I can address them in the next installment of toilet talk. Have you ever used a composting toilet? Would you be willing to welcome one into your home? If not, why not?