Toilet with toilet paper

Guide to Composting Toilets – How to Use and Maintain

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Reviewed by Greg Head

Last Updated on October 10, 2024 by Alice Benny

With more and more people searching for ways to become more eco-friendly, composting toilets are a popular way to start in that direction.

Becoming environment friendly requires more than just buying energy saving bulbs or trying to recycle everything made of plastic.

Taking care of human sanitation in an eco-friendly way is also a very effective way of going green.

How Does a Composting Toilets Work?

Dry and composting toilets utilize a natural process, one that requires no chemicals and very little water.

This is a way to turn human waste into something that can be used to improve the soil’s quality of being more nutritious to the plants.

A composting toilet uses an aerobic process to decompose and process the waste.

This requires little to no water and absolutely no chemicals.

In order to support the aerobic process the materials used are peat moss and sawdust.

These absorb the liquid and reduce the odor.

Why Use a Composting Toilet?

There are many benefits of a composting toilet that can be beneficial to the environment and yourself such as:

  • They greatly help to reduce the amount of water used
  • More fresh water is saved that usually would have gone to waste with the waste
  • Great for the environment as no chemicals are required to dispose the waste
  • Can be used anywhere because they do not require water supply
  • Save money as you won’t require any plumbing
  • Take it with you when going camping or hiking
  • It adds a natural aspect to your life, the cycle of reusing and not wasting

Maintaining a Composting Toilet

The most important thing you have to do when using a composting toilet is never to add anything that is likely to kill microbes that are important for breaking down waste.

This requires that you do not add any cleaning agents or chemicals such as bleach and ammonia products.

These artificial chemicals destroy the beneficial bacteria.

Instead of these, you need to use water and baking soda.

The mixture of these two will help the microbes do a better job at their breaking down the waste and not destroying anything beneficial in the waste.

There are a lot of people who like flushing things down the drain. Make sure you or anyone using it never does that.

A composting toilet’s sole purpose is to process human excretion and nothing else.

Flushing down old medicine and antibiotics will kill the bacteria and harm the microbes that are necessary in breaking down the waste.

If anyone in the family has been using antibiotic medicines over a long period of time, like 6 months, then it is better if they do not use a composite toilet.

It will be present in their excretion and will definitely kill the microbes and the bacteria.

All-in-all, composite toilets are versatile, convenient, eco-friendly and stop wasting so much fresh water. There are millions of people who are not getting fresh water to drink.

By using composting toilets, the world’s fresh water issue can be greatly reduced, minimizing your impact on the environment as well. Consider a DIY composting toilet as well. 

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