Make: Technology on Your Time Volume 32

Composting Toilets MADE EASY

Poop in a bucket, save the Earth.

Written and photographed by Tim Anderson

Your excrement contains the nutrients to fertilize and grow the food that feeds you. This was known and practiced from the dawn of agriculture until modern times.

Then the use of chemical fertilizers made it possible to discard excrement into sewers instead of returning it to fields. The germ theory of disease made it seem desirable to do so.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in vast amounts of purified drinking water being used to flush soil fertility out into the oceans. In the oceans these excess nutrients cause “dead zones” from algae overgrowth and decomposition, which depletes the oxygen in the water. In these “eutrophic” areas, fish literally ...