Item — HN Reader

And yet this problem has already been solved with composting toilets for many years.

Why do we need to build such a fancy and complicated device when all you need is to pee in a separate bucket from your poo, and let the poo aerate/dry naturally? Mix in some dry mulch and you're done!

Urine itself is sterile and can be easily treated/recycled.

3 comments

Composting toilets have problems. This is effectively a composting toilet that solves all those problems. The biggest problem of all is that there is just not enough time and storage to compost on site (on site being your bathroom). This solves that problem. If you are going to take the poo out of the bathroom at all for composting elsewhere, then you might as well just take it all the way out of the house and to a facility. If you are going to take the poo out of the bathroom at all then it really needs to be tidy. This solves that nicely.

>Urine itself is sterile

This is a misconception that particularly annoys me, probably because it was the (incorrect) excuse a nurse once gave me when he accidentally spilled a urinal filled with liquid all over me while I was bed-ridden in an ICU. [0] [1]

[0]: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/turns-out-urine-isn...

[1]: http://www.stritch.luc.edu/newswire/news/study-debunks-commo...

    he accidentally spilled a urinal filled with liquid all over me while I was bed-ridden in an ICU. [0] [1]

Well that's a horrible experience. I too am quite surprised the sterile urine legend lives on.

Agreed. We have a composting toilet at a remote cabin, and it works great. No muss, no fuss, no odors, just rotate the bins a few times a year and dump the dried mulch.

Now imagine eight people using that toilet every day all year long. Imagine that household is in a city of 200,000. All that poo is never going to compost fast enough. This new type of toilet is for high usage and high adoption rates. It could turn a total cesspool of a city into something clean. A composting toilet in every home in the same scenario would just result in mountains of barely degraded poo at the end of every street.

But the toilet discussed here also has solids that need to be collected and disposed of. Composting toilets come in varying sizes, and properly maintained, result in mulch as the end product, not mountains of barely degraded poo.