An Appreciation of Ecological Sanitation (or Turds for Nerds) - EMF 2026

So I'm Val and uh I've lived on a houseboat off and on well mostly on for about 30 years and as such uh I have had to deal with a lot of different sewage systems including temp's water throwing the sewage into an outlet pipe just near my boat on the on the temp's river. Um, but some of the sewage systems that I've had to or to contend with are things like Elsand, which is probably about the worst, vacuum systems, things in a bucket, uh, um, masserators and the loathed, very expensive, but didn't work very well. Maybe it was just the people running it vacuum system. So when I was going to move the boat to a new marina, I thought it was time to try something new and hence ecological sanitation. Uh which is a closed loop system. No, which sorry. So it means that um there's closed loop means that it's going to stay in a static state. So hopefully the whole thing will go into an equilibrium state and you won't wind up with huge amounts of feces on your deck of your boat uh which is stacking up and smelling and everybody hates you. Uh, and the system that I'm talking about today that I've made is an aerobic system, but you don't have to have an app an aerobic system to be in an ecoand thing, but it makes it a lot easier. And this will be the reason why I haven't got focus. which is there's two types of microbes. There's the anorobic type of microbe which is the one that is basically the smelly one. And if you look at the equation there you may notice that what the it's giving off is uh methane which is pretty stinky, rotten egg gas and ammonia. all of which are not something that the neighbors are going to appreciate. Uh whereas if you use aerobic sanitation, this is where the inputs are in a solid state. So you're not using a flushing toilet, you're using a composting toilet. Uh, in fact, the toilet that we use has a separation of urine from the solids to make sure that it's not sitting in a huge pile of water or water waterlike substances because that is what's creating the smell. And you can see here that the equations for this reaction is a lot less smelly because the only outputs are CO2 and H2O plus the normal organic uh stuff that's left behind after the microbes have eaten all the yummy feces and greens and other things you might throw in there. And uh if you get the process right, it works out very well. in fact surprisingly well I found uh and I was pretty surprised almost like magic. So what should I stay? So I'm just going to go through a little quick history of how we got to if the aerobic system is so much better than the anorobic system. How did we ever get stuck with throwing huge amounts of water into our sewage system and taking what used to be an extremely valuable commodity which was which was all the fertilizer because all the nutrients are going into humans and then we take all of that we throw huge amounts of water in it turn it into a horrible uh sewage and then spend a lot more money trying to get rid of the water out of it. And so here is a very quick little history. Hopefully, it'll be quick. So, we used to have the night soil men, and the night soil men were, even though they were shunned by most of society, they were actually very wealthy people because the fertilizer trade was very well paid. And you can see from this calling card uh that this this wasn't, you know, a cheap business. This is not the sort of shuffling sort of ogre that they usually show as being the night soil men. So, this is a little picture of the people that the previous man who owned that business might have employed. Uh, and they've got the little sanitation bucket there and uh and off they go. Now one of the problems that happened was even before we got the flushing toilet all the rest of that sort of thing though the anorobic the aerobic system even working quite well when there was quite sparsely populated uh areas as soon as you got into a city situation you started getting a lot of people who were digging trenches and holes and though that might work well when you've got a little bit of land around you in a little crop in London for instance it does not work very well. And so we've even at 1660, we've got a little thing from Peep saying that uh that a great heap of turds had flooded his basement from his next door neighbor. And uh and also there was a lot of dangerous gases and things that were put off uh by these cess bits which they then tried to contain by uh burying them and that sort of thing which actually just sort of made the whole anorobic thing worse. that at this point the germ theory and aerobic and anorobic microbes had not been discovered and the prevailing philosophy of how disease was spread was by myasma and this is from the Napoleonic war showing that cholera is ripping through all the uh troops not because they've just got a latrine full of germs and they're not disposing of it particularly well, it's because of the foul air. And so when they decide to start making a sewage system, they decide that uh that water is the way to go because so here we've got uh a little timeline of adding extra water which is uh the invention of the flushing toilet And in fact, in 1775, when Cummings invented the Sbend, it made it even worse because they were trying to stop the methane from coming back up the pipe from the septic tank. So, they needed huge amounts of water to get it over the Sbend to put it into the septic tank in the first place and made it a lot lot worse. Excuse me. So once the flushing toilet had become very popular, this had ruined the whole fertilizing business because it was now filled with water. It was very very heavy to transport. Uh the farmers didn't want it because it was so water logged. They had water. What they wanted was fertilizer, not gallons and gallons of smelly sludge. And again they thought that this was where disease was coming from from the smell. [cough] So they decided based on the myasma theory to build a lovely sewer. And this is Basiljet building the sewer for London. And uh he has buried all the all the sewage things which used to run open in the street. So that got rid of the smell and presumably they thought that's got rid of all the germs and and uh they but they didn't start building it until after the great stink. And this is a picture of the great stink when parliament was evacuated because it smelt too bad. And that's when they decided that they would commission Basiljette. And here's a picture of him building the sewer to uh build this great big sewer with an outlet of 75 million gallons where at uh Cross Ness, which is where there was which is just a little bit further east than than uh the edge of London at the time down by Wulitch. And this was where they where the outflow of the all the 2.5 million people's sewage went with great globs of water. And what happened here was this is an accident that happened just after the sewer had been completed which is the sinking of the Princess Alice uh hit by a collier right at the point where that 75 million gallons was being put out into the temps. And there was a huge huge brewhaha about this because out of the 750 people on board, 650 of them died. And uh and there was an inquest where the official uh cause of death was drowning, but the Times and a lot of other newspapers reported that it was actually because it was a sthing mess of bubbling stuff that looked like soda water. And the reason for that was that the micros were still busy working there. They thought that the water would purify and take away all the sewage. But in fact it was all the heavy sludge that stuck to the bottom. The temps is quite uh got a lot of undulations in terms of the river bottom. And so there was huge pools of toxic anorobic sludge sticking under there. and all the methane and ammonia and whatnot was bubbling up. So a lot of people said it wasn't drowning it was asphixxiation but that was not the official official thing. Meanwhile, in France, Louis Pastor had invented, well, not invented, discovered aerobic and anorobic uh microbes. And here's a response from 10 years after it got more or less adopted that germs were real. And that's what we decided would be the best thing to do is kill them all. And that's what a lot of people made a lot of money doing. And so it goes that we got to the point where uh we've got the modern sewage system and if you look at each uh step along the way, it's trying to get the water out of the sewage. Uh and even though at the end of this process, they do recover some of the sludge and turn it into fertilizer. the cost of all these tanks. And in fact, they even go so far as to reach the thing to try and get the aerobic microbes to do the work because because they heat it up and they can eat things that and they're much faster and whatnot. So huge amounts of money is spent on one putting all the drinking water for us into our private homes for us to into and then pumping it at great expense all the way around a city for instance and then spending even more money trying to get all the water out again. And uh and we don't even do that very well because here's a report from the rivers trust showing how many rivers are seen as not being not being fit for the creatures that used to live there. And as you can see, it's a bit of a mess. And I think the rivers trust are reasonable about saying what's polluting, what's not. Anyway, here's a little quick rundown of uh the history of toilets. Uh, and you'll see that we start off not using any water. We go off at that point when the toilet becomes very fashionable and everybody wants one into using huge amounts of water, especially for the wonderful invention of the Sben to stop the methane. And then back down to the very one at the end here, which is what I'm going to talk about next, which is ecological sanitation using no water at all. Well, that's not quite true, but we'll get to that. So, here's uh the ecological sanitation system that I put together, and it starts off with a a a toilet that's uh from Sweden, who tend to be the leaders in all of this type of technology, which is separating out the feces from the urine. So there's two chambers that that you'll see there. Urine goes one way and the solids go into this uh composting system which is called a hot composter which in our case is again from Sweden called a Jura form 270. It's called 270 because it uh takes 270 L which is just about right for the two of us who live on the house boat. And uh yep, it stays in the tumblers. It gets turned around and then it goes out and put onto my little garden that I have on the boat. Now to get this, the very important thing about running a system like this, especially in a very small space, is it can't smell. It can't get bigger and expand out to take over the whole of the boat. uh and it has to be quite quick in the way that it breaks down stuff and I have to be able to get rid of the final output. Now one of the things that makes all of this pro possible is to create a good recipe for a microbe. So this is took me a little while to come up with but with help. So this is the four things at the bottom are the ones that I can't change. So, in other words, we've got the feces, we've got the toilet paper, we've got our fruit and vegetable scraps, and we drink a lot of coffee. Uh, the cardboard and wood shavings at the top are the are the carbon that we need to balance it to get that ratio of 30 to1, which is what the aerobic microbes like. So, I'm trying to get them a very tasty dish that they are just going to eat like crazy and breed like crazy. And uh so the magic ingredient in this is to find a nice source of carbon. And this is what we use, which is a mix of uh wood shavings that is designed for a rabbit and some cardboard, which is mostly Amazon boxes. And uh so that's the thing that we there's the variable that you top up to get the carbon ratio right. Here's [clears throat] here's a picture from inside that that uh hot composter where you I've got a I've also got a moisture uh dial as well. You can see there it's not. This is more or less at the beginning of the summer. The white stuff you can see there is the aerobic microbes which are two types at this point. uh which I'm probably not going to be able to come out uh but one is called actctiminus I don't know and basillus subtilus and um these are the first phase of the composting process which is called the meophilic which is you can see goes up to about 40° so it's from 25 to 40° And oh, and the other white stuff which I love is uh the m it's a fungal mcelium because mycelium I think is wonderful. And here it is just a few days later where it uh where it's climbing up into the uh towards the thermopilic ones which is a good thing in because uh it these ones can get very very hot. In fact, they are supposed to be able to get up to about 70° in this particular composter that I've got. Whether or not it actually makes it, I don't know. But the last just before I came here, I did a reading on it and it showed me that I was up to 52 degrees and it had been rising steadily. So, I'm pretty pleased about that. And the other thing that is amazing about this, and it really is like magic, we can throw 16 lers of mixed sort of uh feces, scraps, coffee, and and the uh wooden cardboard. And the cardboard and wood shavings remain, but the the all the what they call the fast volatiles disappear in days and the whole thing shrinks down in amazing way. So once it gets going, it is really quite an astonishing process. Well, to me anyway. I didn't really think it would do that. And I've got a little graph. Well, I first I'm going to show this which is just so that instead I don't want to encourage people to play with their poo unless they know what they're doing. Uh so here's a little graph showing you what you need to achieve to make sure that that your stuff is going to be safe. Now you can see along the bottom axis this is uh this is time and the other one the y- axis is the temperature it needs to be the big sewage processing plants they because they're running anorobic microbial practice they get the uh methane actually get that off from the in a bioreactor and use it to heat up the whole of the sewage because they don't actually the anorobic microbes don't get anywhere near this heat. Whereas if you use the aerobic ones, they'll do it themselves if you've got enough of it. The little system I've got is only just on the cusp of being big enough to actually hit that sort of temperature. But then again, I am not trying to sell this to anybody. I am going I am not uh selling the produce from this. And so this sort of range which I've ringed here is quite good enough for what I'm doing with it. In fact, I don't grow food in it at all. Here's here's a little graph I did of how it what the uh rate at which it goes. So you'll see these little jaggy lines that each week we take all the uh I'll call them fast volatile we each week we put all the stuff into the composter and you'll see that that little edgy sawtooth is how quickly it gets rid of it and the things that are actually climbing up are what they call the slow volatiles and those are the the the uh things that you can see uh in orange here which are the wood chips and the cardboard and that type of stuff and the and the other ingredient is water because it wants to be moist. So the blue one is is the moisture content. When I first did this I got it up to about I misread what the composting people said the bakers of the compost. So I looked at that straight line going up there and it got to about 3 months and I thought, "Oh no, it's just going to go straight up and and it's not going to last anywhere near as long as I thought before it fills up." What I didn't realize is that once it gets a critical mass and it starts and I got this recipe right that it would suddenly sort of start digesting the stuff at a phenomenal rate. So here it the mark in the middle is where I'm the composter has two chambers. One is the active chamber and the other one is the one that they say is curing. So 270 so just under 120 L is where I'm going to switch over and start filling up the other one. And the one on the right is it's going up and down because I still want the microbes to be digesting the rest of the cardboard. So, I'm still adding little bits of water as needs be. I've got a little moisture meter to make sure that it's the right consistency because the microbes don't like it if it's not it's not nice and moist for them and they'll just die and do nothing. Here's a picture of the composter in question. And this is should should last the two of us for about for about I think probably about 18 months, maybe even as long as a two years. We haven't run it that long, so I can't say for sure, but certainly on that graph that I showed previously, it has hit those marks. So, I have been measuring it. Here's some of the uh what I've got here also is some of the bamboo and sunflowers which are very very heavy feeders. So that the compost that is created, which out of all of that years or worth of stuff that's put into the composting bin probably will turn out to be only about 30 odd lers of actually finished soil, which is all that I buy for my little garden that I've got on the deck of the boat anyway. So it works out quite nicely. And here's a little picture of my garden out on the back of the boat. And uh so that that is pretty much it. But there are I'm not quite finished. There are a few other I just like to mention that there are quite a few few uh initiatives by the WHO and the UN about trying to find alternatives to using water as a mechanism for transport and for you know these massive great sewage plants. And one of the things that Sweden has done is to make uh not individual ones but ones for like a block of apartments or you know like a thousand people. So you now get a little local thing and that's a good thing because what you can then say is that you know what the inputs are from that uh and you can run a much smaller system. you don't have to have the huge amounts of water that you're using to unblock the pipes and travel along and all the rest of that which costs a lot of money. And the other thing is with the sewage systems are so anonymous that if you look at the sort of things that people throw down the sewage, it's amazing. There's not just, you [snorts] know, rubbish like people's shoes and socks. Uh, apparently, uh, flame retardant is a very big thing that people like to get rid of down there. And maybe that's a good thing if there's such a lot of methane around. I don't know. Uh, and all sorts of chemicals and things which makes it very hard for a sewage company to be able to sort of manage all the different things that they may or may not have to deal with. So, so having a a local system means at least you can tell this is a residential block. if there is anybody putting paint or chemicals down there that they can be called out and you can keep much better control over it. Means the systems can be smaller and more focused and uh and I think that it would be good if we did try and look at decentralizing the system and getting rid of a lot of the water out of uh the sewage. And here's last little side which is just some references. Uh there's a number of people that are going back to the night soil thing which called you know the circular res revolution where they will come around on a little bike and bring you a sealed container a little bin so you can go and collect it. You can call them up. It's not even that expensive depending on where you live. I think it's about 20 quid a week they're charging for the people who hackne marshes to go and collect up from the little canal boats and things like that. So worth thinking about. Anyway, thanks very much. Hope you liked it. [applause]