DIY Portable Compost Toilet System for Under $50!

Looking for an inexpensive, ecological way to deal with your poop? You just found it.

No matter how you look at it, dealing with human waste is a big deal. Generally speaking, the most expensive parts of our homes have to do with sanitation. Plumbing, porcelain fixtures, and water-proofing – it adds up.

But what if there was a way to accommodate your effluvia, save space inside your home, lower the price tag of your tiny house project, and save thousands of gallons of water every year?

There is, and it’s called the Humanure System. (Think human + manure.)

You can come for a visit in the sustainable community where I live, where have thought long and hard about how we can make sure our ‘business’ is ecologically groovy, and the humanure system has performed wonderfully for nearly two decades. Take it from us, this system truly works.

How? Instead of making your daily offering to the porcelain god, you nestle it cozily in some saw dust or another dry, organic material that absorbs moisture. When your bucket is full, you give it a straw house in the back yard and let it hang out with some microbes for a couple years. When it’s finished, you have pure, clean composted soil ready for your flowers. Check out this video to see it in action.

The alternative is to flush it all away to a massive municipal treatment plant where it gets treated with tons of chemicals, wasting perfectly good potable water, (upwards of 10-billions gallons a year in the USA, just for flushing toilets,) and depleting our ecosystems of vital nutrients. Your doodoo deserves better than that.  So does your garden.

There are plenty of other benefits to the humanure system as well. It’s low-maintenance, low-tech, and will save you a lot of space and money when it comes to designing your own tiny house project.

In fact, you can have a decorative, odor-free humanure toilet in your tiny house for less than $50. A deposit site in the back yard might cost a little more, unless you’re able to use reclaimed materials, but you can get everything you need at your local home improvement outlet.

If you’re interested in seeing how the humanure system works first hand, in addition to learning a lot about tiny house living as whole, make sure to keep an eye on the Dancing Rabbit Eco-village website for visitor program dates, work exchange opportunities, and other ways to spend some time with us in 2016. We will even let you try out one of our humey-buckets.

Bonus: check out this fun video for some infotainment on the subject of humanure!