Poop is a sensitive issue in Durango, where scientific studies recently proved that too much human feces is flowing into the Animas River downstream to Farmington.
The Durango City Council is pondering whether to spend $55 million, deemed necessary by consultants, to upgrade the wastewater treatment plant to meet the state’s environmental standards for clean water.
But instead of investing more money in improving water-based toilet technologies, Jeff Wright, founder of Everything Dirt Composting, is advocating humanure – or the composting of human waste – as the No. 1 solution to the city’s problem with No. 2.
“As a nation, we need to realize that we can’t afford to perpetuate the sewage system technology, and the city of Durango can’t afford $55 million on a sewage plant that will require constant maintenance,” he said.
“Composting humanure is something we can do as a community that offers a perpetual energy equation,” he said. “If we cling to our water toilets, we won’t make the important change needed to evolve us into a new energy, environmental and economic future. We need to compost our toilet contents and also take the ‘river’ completely out of the conversation about us using the bathroom.”
Wright hopes that Everything Dirt Composting, the humanure firm he’s started that specializes in building waterless toilets and composting bins, will become a service that streamlines composting for households throughout the region so that it’s as easy as recycling.
Humanure works like this: You poop in a waterless toilet and, when done, throw sawdust on top, which prevents stink and dries the poop out. Then, when the toilet basin is full, the humanure is removed to a composting bin in the garden with other organic materials such as vegetable rinds that might otherwise go down the disposal. Heat helps all the materials biodegrade. Eventually, it becomes fertilizer.
In the coming months, Wright is hoping to persuade City Council to adopt a program that would encourage Durango residents to install waterless toilets and bins to compost all their organic materials: humanure, meat, bones, grease, dairy, vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grinds, paper towels, plates, butter wrappers and corn-oil-based compostable plastics.
“The goal of this business is to collect all organics at a household level,” he said.
Wright said he is still trying to work out a larger-scale economic model.
Embracing a better way
For years, leading lights have tried to vault modern toilet technology beyond the costly, 19th-century water-based sewage-system model popular in America and Western Europe and into a less expensive future that safely disposes of human waste without flushing, sewer pipes, water or electricity.
In 2011, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started its “Reinvent the Toilet” competition, initially offering $3 million to university researchers for the best technology that “removes germs from human waste and recovers valuable resources such as energy, clean water and nutrients”; “operates ‘off the grid’ without connections to water, sewer or electrical lines”; and costs less than 5 cents per user per day.
Enter the composting toilet, which is gaining popularity among environmentalists throughout the country, including in the city of Austin, Texas, which approved its first composting toilet in 2011. Since then, waterless toilets have dethroned their predecessors in the public parks of Columbus, Ohio, San Francisco and Manhattan.
Is it practical?
Not everyone is convinced that Wright’s attempts to compost humanure will gain traction in the city of Durango or La Plata County.
“I don’t know how anybody could make money doing that,” said city of Durango Utilities Director Steve Salka.
“For county residents, it’s easier to have us remove bulk septage every three to five years and take it to the city and treat it properly so that the water can be used again and returned to the environment properly,” he said.
Salka allowed that he needed to read more about humanure, but said he himself would never embrace the technique, given that it sounded viscerally disgusting.
“How much human waste are you really going to be treating on your own property?” he asked. “It just sounds kind of nasty, and I don’t want to create a hazard to human health at my property.”
‘A great solution’
Some are already leaping into the humanure future.
Mercury Payment Systems co-founder Marc Katz had Wright install waterless toilets and compost bins at Ewing Mesa, a 1,850-acre tract of land in south Durango that he purchased in April with an eye to donating the parcel for public use.
Katz, who’s been friends with Wright for years, said at first, he was “squeamish” about using a waterless toilet and composting his humanure.
“I know a lot of people feel this squeamish about poop,” he said. “It’s just fear of the other. But then I went to his house and went potty in his composting toilet.”
Katz reviewed the experience as “very pleasant.”
He asked Wright to build a series of composting toilets at Ewing Mesa.
“We needed to have a couple of crappers, and having been friends with Jeff, it was a no-brainer, and really fortuitous,” he said. “Over time, I came to understand the value of composting our waste back into the soil. It’s a natural process that all animal poop is designed to do – return nutrients to nature.”
He said in terms of user-experience, there was no difference between defecating in a flush toilet and a waterless toilet.
“You wouldn’t know they were different until we told you to use sawdust instead of flushing,” he said.
And once composted, the humanure is odorless, he said.
“Give it a year, you can hold it right up to your nose, and it smells like organic material that would be good fertilizer,” he said.
Katz said he thought Wright’s vision of starting a municipal composting service “isn’t crazy.”
“It’s just different and unconventional,” he said. “It’s a really great solution for rural places in the county where people have modest amounts of crap and septic systems are inconvenient.”
Katz said, “I think Jeff is a pioneer for being passionate and proselyting about this.”
