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Judy of the Woods productivity, creativity, sustainability |
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Wild Food Handbook print your own handy pocket foraging companion and hedgerow herbal, or get the FREE plant list with details on edibility of over 350 plants. 
■ Download a copy now In this Section Last update: 1 February 2005 Critical Mass To develop more projects to share with you and run this website, I need funds. By donating even a small amount, you can get the ball rolling. For more information please visit the ■ Support page |
Composting, recycling and waste amanagementWouldn't it be great if we could replace the word waste with resource? Well, utopia may be a long way off, but there is a lot we can do to minimise waste. In this section I will tell you how I deal with waste at my place, and give links to other sites and sources of information. The main areas I'll cover are
Dry Compost ToiletThis is where I will talk s**t. A frequent objection I hear to living this lifestyle is the prejudgism about compost toilets. Smelly, dirty, cold, inconvenient, disgusting job emtying them, old fashioned, primetive..... However, one comment I had recently from a visitor who actually used the compost toilet (a comment backed up entirely by my own experience) was that he felt odd going back to the flush toilet, s*****g inside the house. And to put it not too delecatly, I'd rather have the pong outside, and from my experience it is actually less than inside a closed room with a flush toilet. A properly placed and used dry compost toilet has very little smell. My own toilet has no smell beyond moist sawdust, and only very occasionally a little whiff of eau de toilete, downwind for a couple of feet next to the building. And the scenery is quite something else! Scenerey apart, I would have a compost toilet in the city. These toilets do not use gallons of purified water, only to flush a resource ultematly into the sea, or create a toxic sludge at the sewage works, mixed with countless unmentenable chemicals which were indescriminatly dumped into toilets, sinks, basins, and from washing machines. No, the end result of the compost toilet is a substance indistinguishable from the stuff you buy at the garden centre for putting into flowerpots. Next objection: dirty. No more so than a flush toilet. You don't eat off one. Treat it with the same hygiene level of that for a flush toilet. Use rubber gloves, avoid unnecessary contact, wash well after cleaning the toilet, and normal hygiene practices after using the toilet. I have not picked up any infection in ten years of using one. Cold: You keep most of your clothes on. If you like to read a book I'm sure its warmer in the house, why bother doing it on the loo? More fibre in your diet may be the answer. A short trip down the garden path is no big deal, even in bad weather. Inconvenient: How often do you use the toilet per day, is it such a big deal? Disgusting job emying the toilet: the end product is like potting compost, and a well designed toilet will mean that that is all you will handle, and with a shovel too. Oldfashioned, primitive: so what? Who cares? Judy on the loo Normally you do take your pants down, even on a compost toilet. This is the little house at the bottom of the path. I hasten to say, that this is not a well designed toilet, it was an experiment, and the next one will be different. Though it works well in most respects, it is not easy to empty, and because of the one chamber design, I do have to move some uncomposted material to the sides after removing the composted 'stuff' from the edges. I won't go into too much detail about how I do it, as this is the way not to do it. I will describe the princapl and how it does work shortly. |
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Related pages
■ Infrastructure
water, communication, transport, access
External links
■ daenvis.org
Info on Jean Pain composting and heating system
■ journeytoforever.org more on Jean Pain methods
■ livingsoil.co.uk
Effective Micro organisms for anaerobic composting and soil improvement, Bokashi
■ wasteonline.org.uk
anything you want to know about waste
■ cityfarmer.org
■ jenkinspublishing.com
build a dry compost toilet
