Category Archives: composters
Composting Difficult Things
Cornell’s Waste Management Institute has a great guide for composting dead cows and diseased animals. For some reason I find myself recommending this guide quite often as a response to questions after we talk. It has some hilarious, but very practical diagrams to follow. Natural Rendering
The Emergency Sanitation Handbook
Our students in the Sanitation, Hygiene, and Integrated Technology lab at PNCA have released the first draft of a hands on guide to managing your own sanitation after an emergency. It’s a fun, fresh, illustrated 16 pager that’s bound to save your ass in an emergency. We’ll be doing some final touches on it with [...]
Portable Composting Toilets for Multi Day Events
The Cloacina Project with design and implementation from PNCA’s graduate students in Collaborative Design created an open source hardware platform for toilets, urinals, hand sinks and privacy screens for portable low cost dry toilets. Recognizing that hardware is only half the problem the PNCA students addressed the user interface by creating a training protocol, help [...]
Compost-heated Greenhouse c.1750
Ním Wunnan points us towards the Lost Gardens of Heligan, where they have restored to operation a “pineapple pit,” a compost-heated greenhouse in fashion in the mid-18th century for growing pineapples in Britain. It is, as far as is known, the world’s only operational pineapple pit.
Tuning the Aeration of our Pile
We’ve built a compost pile that is designed to be minimally turned and composted in a vessel, so we’re using a blower to get air in, and we need to tune the aeration rate. Our first problem running aeration tests is to measure the effective aeration of our system. As detailed below, the New Alchemy [...]
Diagram of Types of Composting Toilets
Ah, at last I found the simplest illustration of types of composting toilets. It’s from a review of household dry sanitation practices around the globe put out by Toilettes du Monde in France. The full article hasn’t been translated into english yet, but the summary has.
Pail Collection and Composting in Skaneateles!
This is the longest-running pail collection system I’ve seen in the Western World. Run from 1908-1998 around summer cottages in upstate New York, 5-gallon buckets were picked up from public outhouses and private summer cottages. Sewage was banned to protect the watershed. PDF article here. Continuous interaction with cottage owners has been essential to the [...]
Now you can Buy
Our posters are now up on cloacina.org, along with a buy button.
Illustrating Waste Management Techniques & Options
I’m working on completing a full illustration of Portland’s waste treatment plant and how it works for a series of posters I’m making about the past, present and the very hopeful future for waste management. If you’re interested in non-cartesian representations of physical processes drop me a line, I need all the advice I can [...]
