Composting toilets present a very green way of disposing and reusing your poop as a natural fertilizer, but they haven’t been widely implemented. Most people don’t want to sit on top of a box of poop or even see it, and they certainly don’t want to touch it. To remedy this coprophobia, an Australian company named Nature Loo came up with a simple design that puts more distance between you and your waste receptacle. Instead of having a compost chamber just beneath your porcelain throne, Nature Loo’s system installs an additional space up to four feet below the bathroom floor.
Whereas some toilets use trap doors to hide away your unmentionables, Nature Loo offers a simple, long-distance toilet system that does not need any moving parts. Plus, by keeping waste farther away, it can sit around long enough to compost itself into a natural fertilizer. To keep the smells down, a small fan constantly draws air downwards so that nothing foul comes back up, and there’s also a battery backup in case the power fails.
There are limits to the Nature Loo. For one thing, to install the system it is necessary to make space to run it through part of the house. Plus, users either need a basement or have to dig a new hole underneath their home unless they want a composting chamber on the ground floor. Albeit a sensible alternative to modern toilets, for now, it seems like Nature Loo is only selling their composting toilets in Australia, though the set up seems simple enough for a DIYer to hack at home.
Images © Nature Loo