Bucket Latrines

In an effort to promote composting latrines and for my own sanitation needs, I use something called a bucket latrine.  That's right - I take a sh!t in a bucket, and then compost it.

It's a very basic system actually.  I take a sh!t in a bucket and then I throw rice hulls on top of it to start the composting process and to remove the odor.  In fact, a variety of dry materials would work in order to compost human excreta; chopped grass or saw-dust do the trick just fine.   The miracle of composting lies in the fact that when human excreta is combined with these dry materials, the combination will kill the harmful pathogens that live in your poop.  Time, a critical mass, and a critical ratio of Carbon to Nitrogen in the mix (roughly 30:1) awakens thermophilic bacteria that heat up the pile and kill pathogens.  Once these pathogens are destroyed, the compost is ready to be used in the farm or the garden.

Every time the bucket is full, I go outside and dump it into my compost bin.  I asked community members to come and help me with a project one day, but didn't tell them it was the compost bin.  After we built the bin, I showed them what I intended to do with it by dumping my bucket in front of them.  To their surprise, disgust, and awe, they themselves saw that composting human excreta in fact doesn't smell.

By the end of my service, the bin should be full.  I have hopes that the next Peace Corps Volunteer that comes to my site will show the community how to utilize the compost.

Rodolfo's Abono

After the Environmental Health Workshops and my bucket latrine demonstration, many of the community members are responsive to the idea of composting latrines.  But you never really know how convinced they actually are, because often times most people just say YES to you because they may be intimidated.  Since it would take a year to show results of my humanure composting, I thought I would introduce the idea of composting cow manure which takes about 6 months.

My host brother Rodolfo is working really hard to get a coffee farm going and I suggested to him that we should make a compost pile.  We went up river where to a cow pasture outside of the Comarcá to collect buckets of cow manure.  I brought the rice hulls that I had so it wouldn't smell too bad on the boat ride back.

The next day we walked the very heavy buckets of cow manure into the jungle and started a small compost pile.  We started by digging into the ground about 18".  The pile is made by the layering of chopped grass/leaves, cow manure, and rice hulls, over and over again.  This should be the right combination of organic material for the composting process to initiate.

We have been going back every 3 weeks to mix the pile, and hopefully we will have some compost to plant by November!  I'm excited that Rodolfo worked with me on this.  Many people in the community would see this as waste of time, but he took the initiative to try something new, and I respect that.

Ecological Sanitation

Ecological sanitation is a system whereby human excreta (humanure) is composted to be re-used as a fertilizer.  What!? THAT'S GROSS!  Reuse my sh*t?!  But the sh*t that comes out of my body is full of harmful pathogens and well, smells like sh*t!  Yes, but there is more to your sh*t than you knew about.  Alongside the harmful pathogens live millions of productive micro-organisms that, under the right conditions, will kill the harmful pathogens which spread diseases.

For pathogen destruction to occur the excreta must be heated up to 140 F, or thermophilic conditions.  Thermophilic conditions are reached by creating a pile of a combination of human excreta with organic material such as grass clippings, rice hulls, or sawdust.   It takes at least one year for these conditions to arrive, therefore compost piles need to sit untouched.  Remarkably, the organic material removes odors and repels flies and mosquitos.

Furthermore, humanure composting is part of the food cycle.

Appropriate technology.

Our community sits on a river bank and has a high water table, which means if you dig more than 2 feet you will find water.  This rules out pit latrines because the pit stays wet, gets full of maggots, smells horrible, and attracts mosquitos.  These mosquitos are vectors for disease transmission as they fly around the community after having touched human excreta.  People in my community, especially women, hate pit latrines for the smell and therefore either use the river or go out into the jungle.

A composting latrine is built above ground and thus avoids reaching the water table.  It is designed to have 2 chambers with a special seat above the chambers that allows the excreta to fall below and also separates urine.  Urine is separated in order to keep the pile at around 50% moisture content.  A wet environment doesn't allow for the pile to reach thermophilic conditions.  After each use the user throws dry material into the chamber.  Start by using one chamber for a year or until it is full, then start using the second chamber.  Leave the organic material in the first chamber to compost for at least one year.  Remove the humanure, dry it out under the sun, and then plant some banana trees!

21st Century technology?

Would you take 2 valuable resources, combine them, to then render both of them as useless?  If I gave you 3 gallons of water and fertilizer would you throw them away?  Unfortunately, our 'modern' sanitation system does exactly that.  Every time we flush the toilet, we combine human excreta and 3 gallons of water to render them both useless.  YES I am classifying human excreta not as waste but as a resource.

As volunteers in the field we come up against the cultural / custom battle of how human excreta is perceived all the time in rural communities.  However, this battle would be x100000 times harder in the Western world, which can be for the most part considered to be fecophobic.  Eastern cultures have been embracing humanure composting for centuries, as they see it as part of an ecological cycle.  In fact, in South Korea humanure has been known to be sold on the black market!

Our current sanitation system does work from a public health standpoint.  However, it is also consumes are amounts of resources and is completely dependent on the grid.  In order for your excreta to move from your house or apartment to waste management facility requires a system that uses a lot of water and a lot of electricity.  Humanure composting uses neither water or electricity.  Could humanure composting be scaled up to someday make an impact on the global warming challenges we face?

Environmental Health Workshops

Participatory Analysis such as Community Mapping, Health Calendar, and a SWOT analysis were used as information gathering tools.  Development practitioners use this information to then design educational seminars, projects, and initiatives in the community.  I used our analysis to design 3 half-day participatory Environmental Health Workshops, one of which was conducted with the Panamanian Red Cross.  The activities in the workshop came from the UN & World Health Organization's PHAST Guide for Health Promotion.

The EH Workshops had 3 goals:

• Analyze the community's current health practices.
• Connect drinking water and lack of sanitation to diarrheal diseases cited on the Health Calendar.
• Provide multiple sanitation options and analytically select the appropriate solution. 

I started with an activity called 3-Pile Sorting where members were given cards with drawings of with a range of good and bad health practices I observed in the community:  from washing hands with soap before eating to defecating in the river, from using a composting latrine to throwing garbage in the river.  In groups they have a discussion to sort the cards under Good for Health, Okay for Health, and Bad for Health. 

As they presented the Bad for Health practices cards, I showed them how those practices brought about the diarrhea and vomiting they cited on their Health Calendar.  This image of how open defecation connects to ingesting feces brought one person in the room to gag.

I then asked how the Good for Health cards could cut these disease vectors.  Latrines and hand washing came up as the solutions.

What kind of latrine is best for Alto Playón?  I asked the community list characteristics of what they want in a latrine:

• No smell
• No flies
• Proximity & Safety
• Private
• Maintenance
• Cost

We then tested their chosen characteristics against a pit latrine, a composting latrine, and a septic system. The pit lost because it smells horrible and attracts mosquitos.  The septic system is far too expensive and unfeasible for a rural community with no running water.  In every workshop the Composting Latrine won!  

The workshops were a success.  In a participatory manner the community not only took a look at their current water and sanitation practices, but also together picked the solution.  This lays the ground work for further education on composting latrines and the formation of a functioning Health Committee.