Humanure | Crazy About Compost

Compost Sanitation in Post Earthquake Haiti

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAuOHecBxP0 Joe's on fire for this presentation... I wonder if it's because it's for the U.S. Composting Council, and my guess is he has to be sharp for those folks. I wonder how supportive the U.S. Composting Council is of the best composting process you can be involved with...would be fun to write them about it (just did). I wish I had the cover materials available that they do in Haiti... tons and tons of sugar cane bagasse. He has 15 gallon buckets in use here, with the front of the compost toilet open. I fill my 5 gallon bucket pretty quickly and would love to try a 15 gallon. I guess the front is open so you don't have to pick it up as high...might be pretty heavy to…

Compost Toilet Dust Suppression Tips

The only unexpected challenge I've encountered since I started using a compost toilet is making sawdust not dusty. Luckily I figured it out pretty quickly, and using a spray bottle is not the easiest way. I used to sit on the toilet, spraying down my sawdust supply in the bucket in front of me...too much effort! After spraying the sawdust seemingly forever, I'd still get to back to the dry, dusty mess after just a few scoops. Now, each week before I bring in my sawdust supply, I use my watering can to soak the bucket of sawdust first. Works like a charm! Simple change, major improvement.

Humanure Handbook review

If there was any book I'd recommend, even to someone that generally isn't interested in environmental issues, it's Humanure Handbook. I can confidently say this book is at the level of Silent Spring. How could a book about composting your bowel movements be important? Urine, feces and food scraps are super high in nitrogen. Leaves, cardboard, paper, straw, hay etc are all high in carbon. When you mix these two components together, in time you get beautiful, fertile compost that our earth desperately needs. What you don't get is chlorine and sodium hypochlorite (amongst other things used in water treatment process), and polluted air from burning off sewage sludge, or possibly worse having that sewage sludge spread on farmlands as a "soil amendment". Jenkins goes into great detail about the…