Oh! Shit!
Yes, let us talk some shit!
All animals shit, including human beings. What happens to the shit? It gets composted and goes back to soil. That is until recently. It is still true for all animals except for human beings. And even with human beings it is a recent problem. As long as they lived close to nature, like the forest people or even rural people, until recently there was no problem. They merrily went to the forest or farm. In fact the word for going to shit in Hindi is ‘Disha Jungle’ (The direction of the forest). In Urdu the word for forest and shit is the same: ‘dast’. What happens there? Well the shit mixes with some biomass and some earth/dust and is converted to compost and gets back to soil. No smell, no nothing! There can be some problems if you are living in very wet areas. However in most cases other living things – like fish etc. take care of it. No worries!
The problem came when humans started living in houses – particularly which have no garden and are a bit far away from forest. Then the toilets came into being. Although theoretically you can have a composting toilet, in practice it has not been solved satisfactorily. The worst distortion came with the idea of using water for flushing the shit away or the so called, ’Flush Toilet’. The problem is compounded in a multi storied flats building. And there is no satisfactory method of disposing of the shit after it is flushed away. Out of sight, out of mind! And the shit remains active with pathogens and pollutes our lakes, water and soil! This is one of the biggest abuses of nature and humanity is paying heavy price for it. However, the water crisis is looming large and within a life time a solution has to be found.
Architects think in terms of spaces. But they never/rarely think of space for composting when they design houses! So here is my two bit contribution to the problem.
1. Always think of shit and shit disposal problem as the first issue to be tackled when planning a living space.
2. Never design a toilet without shit disposal as integral to the design.
3. The shit disposal should occur as soon as and as near the place of production of the shit.
4. Completely avoid using water for flushing the shit away. You may use a little water for cleaning your bottom. Anyway composting does require some moisture.1
5. The toilet should be near the living space (the attached bathroom!) It will ensure a safe and clean toilet.
6. The end product – the compost should be available in ‘situ’, that is near the toilet.
7. You can combine composting of biodegradable waste of the household (kitchen waste) with composting toilets if the design permits. Otherwise that should also be composted within the living space.
The Big Challenge
All flush toilets need to be converted to composting toilets. There is no running away from it. It is an integral part of ‘Transition Town’! We should see it as a big opportunity. It will provide a large number of green jobs and it will save billions of litres of water and clean up the environment in a significant way. What more do you need? Every town can support a small enterprise. The big cities can support several. Roughly a population of 10, 000 can support a small enterprise.
Then there is the issue of use of the compost. It can support urban greening in a big way – gardens, kitchen gardens and terrace gardens with home grown vegetables! This is another green enterprise!
Technically it is a very solvable problem. The references given below are a good guide to the problems and how they have been solved. Only it requires a change in the mind set of builders and users. So we need to work on that aspect also. Otherwise the problem would have been solved a long time ago.
Notes and References
1. However the two pit compost toilet popularised by Sulabh Shouchalaya/UNICEF is a flush toilet. But it uses very little water to flush the shit a few feet away to the compost pits behind the toilet.
1. Sanitation Without Water – Uno Winbald & Wen Kilama. !985
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Sanitation Without Water – Uno Winbald & Wen Kilama – Free ebook download as PDF File (.pdf), Text File (.txt) or read book online for free. permakultura.
2. For basic understanding of composting read a booklet by Venkat ‘On Composting: Recycling of Organic Wastes.’ 2004, Hyderabad, Manchi Pustakam. Rs. 20/-
3. The most comprehensive book on the subject is, Humanure by Joseph C. Jenkins, Indore, 2023, Banyan Tree Bookstore. Rs. 350/-
T Vijayendra (1943 – ) was born in Mysore, grew up in Indore and went to IIT Kharagpur to get a B. Tech. in Electronics (1966). After a year’s stint at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, he got drawn into the whirlwind times of the late 60s.
Since then, he has always been some kind of political-social activist. His brief for himself is the education of Left-wing cadres and so he almost exclusively publishes in the Left-wing journal Frontier, published from Kolkata. For the last ten years, he has been active in the field of ‘Peak Oil’ and is a founder member of Peak Oil India and Ecologise. Since 2015 he has been involved in Ecologise! Camps and in 2016 he initiated Ecologise Hyderabad. In 2017 he spent a year celebrating the Bicentenary of the Bicycle. Vijayendra has been a ‘dedicated’ cyclist all his life, meaning, he neither took a driving license nor did he ever drive a fossil fuel-based vehicle.
He divides his time between Hyderabad and organic farms at several places in India, watching birds and writing fiction. He has published a book dealing with resource depletion, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, a novella, an autobiography and a children’s science fiction story on the history of the bicycle, apart from booklets on several topics. His booklet, Kabira Khada Bazar Mein: Call for Local Action in the Wake of Global Emergency (2019, https://archive.org/details/kabira-khada-bazaar-mein) has been translated into Kannada, Bengali and Marathi and is the basic text for the emerging Transition Networks in these language regions. His last book ‘Vijutopias’, which has 12 short stories, is an entertaining book full of hope and energy in these dismal times.
Email: [email protected]