humanure composting | Crazy About Compost

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…

Holy Crap! My Very Own Compost Toilet.

After nearly a month of simply having a 5 gallon bucket and some sawdust, I finally built my own proper compost toilet! It cost me a total of about $20 and two hours of work to get it done...well worth it. This lives in my basement, but I brought it outside to snap a well-lit photo in front of its "sewer system" (the compost pile). I simply followed the instructions in Joseph Jenkins' Humanure Handbook ...I strongly suggest picking this up. Even if you have no interest in humanure composting, it's still a very critical read for learning the history of human waste and how we've broken the human nutrient cycle. For the fecophobes out there: read about thermal kill times and how compost has been used to fully bioremediate…

FAQ(v): Is odor a concern when composting livestock mortalities?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmslZkOAWB4 Perfect! I was wondering if anyone on the ol' Youtube would cover animal carcasses in compost piles. While brief, it really is that simple- if you're composting carcasses or other potentially smelly stuff like humanure, just add brown materials until it doesn't smell. In this video he mentions 18 to 24" of material on top of the carcasses, so I'm guessing this is a pretty huge pile of carcasses! I'm curious if their technique was inspired by the Humanure Handbook or not...the bin they show later in the video looks just like a Jenkins-style bin.