Persimmon Glen

This stems from the Victorian days when people were wrapped up tighter than a drum, from the wire corsets to the stiff collars tight around the neck and no one ever talked about about sex, let alone any kind of bodily functions.

This is when the first automated 'toilet' was invented.

Before then and for the thousands of years that humans have walked the earth, human waste disposal is something that everyone had to deal with. It was an everyday part of life.

If you're old enough, you may fondly remember the trips you made to the outhouse. I say 'old' and 'fondly' because memory usually dims how smelly it was and how you could sit and watch the spiders catch a fly in their web while you were doing your duty.

How about the late night trips with a flashlight or lantern when you had a bad case of the back door trots?

I bet you could remember every inch of the well worn path to the little house out back.

Don't forget the worry of being inside when the neighbor kids decided to pull a prank and push the building over.

Before that, in cities, people emptied their chamber pots out the windows. Ever hear the saying 'heads up?'  Now you know where that came from.

In medieval times, most castles had a garderobe. That was just a wooden seat with a hole and all waste, including kitchen waste,  just went straight out and down the side of the hill.  Sometimes into a cesspit or the moat  (and you thought a moat was romantic).  Imagine the poor sot that had to clean that up!  He had to fight the pigs and the dogs that eagerly snuffled through all that waste.

In the early nineteenth century the first 'Earth Closet" was invented. This contraption was a wooden box inside the house and when you finished you pulled a chain that would deposit granulated clay, ashes, or earth on top of the leavings to help dessicate waste and prevent odor, and when it was full, the box would be removed to empty outside somewhere. Just a small step above the outhouse. 

Then along came the 'Water Closet'. Well, let me tell you, this little invention won hands down in the Victorian age for popularity, because one could do their business and have it flushed away and you never had to think about it again. Most didn't realize that waste was directed straight to the rivers and streams where their water supply came from.

In the world of toilets, mankind has made very little advancement since then when it comes to waste disposal. We like flushing and not giving a thought to what happens to it after that.

Cities are being overrun with waste and the cost is staggering. The flush toilet is the single largest consumer of water. The average family uses approximately 35,200 gallons of water per year. The cost for utlities infrastructure is around $500-$600 per person. The sewage treatment facilties for a large city can consume as much as 900,00 kilowatts of energy , 500 tons of chemicals and 45,000 gallons of fuel oil daily. Even if we had an abundance of water, the other resources flush toilets use have their limits. (Trivia Library, History of Toilets)

 Why, even a pit latrine is more ecologically sound and safe then a flush toilet.

Around the world there is a serious shortage of drinking water, and we are using it to flush waste down the drain, mainly because no one wants to think about it.

At the very least, why don't we use greywater to flush our toilets with?

Sweden is one of the most ecologically advanced nations in the world. See the Clivus Multrum toilet system.

We need to wake up to the cost to our precious resources from our Victorian way of thinking about human waste.

For more information, check out The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure, Third Edition

For further reading Carol Steinfelds' book called Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants is an excellent read.

Wikipedia has a pretty comprehensive aritcle on the subject of composting toilets