Get to know your excrement a little better

There's been some press on alternative ways of disposing of pee and poop (... I have lots of friends with toddlers now...) that involve thinking outside of the our traditional box and things that are potentially a bit on the "gross" side. Except... that they're not gross. They're just more logical.

Now I'm going to broach the subject again, even if you are giving your monitor the same semi-disgusted "are you serious you crazy tree-hugging radical" semi-patronizing smile and look that some of my good friends gave me. I remember first starting to talk about this when reading books like Cradle to Cradle by Bill McDonaugh and Michael Braungart. Something like a flush-less urinal made so much sense to me, but it seemed to generate a fair amount of resistance amongst people. The smell, the pee staying there, or just general "eww" involved with not having our excrement flushed as far away from us as fast as possible. (The dirty truth is, most men don't flush anyway, so it wouldn't be that much different. Only the urinals would be designed in such a way that the pee would flow down itself and not pool up at the bottom.)

So this post might be a bit more graphic than you expected.

Anyway, I was happy to see that flush-less urinals had made it in as many different places as Budapest, Sweden, Hong Kong, and Beijing. But they're still pretty rare here. In fact, I don't remember seeing any.

Then there are the even more radical changes... many involving separation and composting systems located at the household level. This is obviously a bit further off, although, logically, if we can get past our disgust with our own shit (let's just be real here) it makes perfect sense to turn our crap into fertilizer.

Now, Diana, my old roommate and classmate, sends me this article, which really puts forth great arguments for why we all not only SHOULD re-think the way we approach shit, but also why it might be necessary in the long run. An excerpt:

"There, up a few steps on a tiled platform, sat a toilet unlike any I’d seen. Its pan was divided in two: solid waste went in the back, and the front compartment collected urine. The liquids and solids can, after a decent period of storage and composting, be applied to the fields as pathogen-free, expense-free fertilizer." (Full article here.)

It's an interesting read, and one I recommend. While not practical in a lot of situations, especially today, it's something that we should really start considering in any sort of new construction or refurbishing of old buildings. Could YOU accept this though? Or would it be too gross?