I’ve always been interested in composting toilets. Why produce messy, dirty, nasty, and hazardous  raw sewage waste coming out of your house when the alternative is to produce high quality compost soil?

Our land doesn’t have a utility sewer around, so we have to process and dispose of sewage on our land anyway, so this is an alternative to consider. For BaanMae, we went with an aerobic treatment system (ATS), which seems to do the job. But it is probably the most complicated part of the house in some ways. (The sewage needs to be pumped from the ATS to a secondary sand filter before it is clean enough to be used in watering plants and the like.)

For BaanLoiNaam in particular (the floating house), which won’t have any utility connections to land, the composting toilet is a simple enough way to deal with this issue. Dump the waste into tanks that can be brought to land once a week or so and dumped into a compost pile. No smell. No mess. No pumps. No risk of flooding screwing up the system.

So rather than install a full ATS or similar in BaanRimNaam, we are thinking of experimenting with a composting toilet as a simple and clean alternative. Here is a link to one of the nicer products out there:
https://www.separett-usa.com/index.php/waterless-urine-diverting-toilet.html

It separates liquid and solid wastes at the point of entry, with each being processed separately. It has an internal fan to suck any odor out to the outside at the point of the toilet, so it may actually be even less smelly than a normal toilet. (One model uses a DC fan, designed for solar only houses such as our own).

There are other models that do the composting inside the toilet unit itself, so you don’t have to touch it until the finished compost is done. But somehow it seems more reliable (and less likely to smell) to have a toilet for doing toilet stuff and a compost area to do composting. Of course, we would keep the human waste compost separate from the leaf and tree compost and use it for non-edible plants. But it just seems kind of cool to “close the nutrient cycle”.

1. Grow food from the land
2. Eat the food
3. Go to the bathroom (using a composting toilet)
4. Compost the waste in “human waste compost” area
5. Use the “human waste compost” to grow non-edible plants like flowers 
6. When the non-edible plants die, compost them in the “plant compost” area
7. Use the “plant compost” to grow more food 

Doesn’t that sound like a rather elegant closed system? (I’ve read that fruit trees may be okay in step #5 since the compost doesn’t get anywhere near the edible fruit, but I think I’ll start out conservatively.)

According to the above manufacturer’s website:

The toilet can be installed in both warm and cold locations, and works well irrespective of the room temperature. That is why Separett toilets are used all over the world, from the dry heat of Africa to the icy cold of Greenland.

So hopefully we can source one in Thailand.