Sanitation In Cooking

Insight To Help You Build Your Own Emergency Or Camping Toilet Bucket For Soil Composting

To ensure you are prepared for a natural disaster or for a camping trip where you will be without a bathroom facility, you can build your own easy-to-make toilet bucket. A portable toilet allows you to take care of your and your family's elimination waste when you don't have access to a modern sewer system. Here are some instructions to help you build your own toilet bucket and how to use the waste to create beneficial soil compost material.

Building a Toilet Bucket

A basic way to build a portable toilet from a bucket allows you to capture the waste to safely dispose of later. You will need a five gallon bucket, a pool noodle, and a heavy duty trash bag that will fit inside the bucket. You will also need some dry absorption material you can sprinkle inside the bucket between uses to soak up any excess moisture, such as shredded newspaper, straw, leaves, or wood shavings. This also helps keep the odors down from the bucket after each use.

To prepare your toilet bucket, cut a slit down the length of your pool noodle so you can press it onto the top edge of your bucket to provide padding while you sit on and use your bucket. You will also need to cut the pool noodle to a shorter length so it will fit around the top of the bucket. Line the bucket with a trash bag, pressing the bag into the bucket, then tucking the edges of the bag around the outside of the bucket to keep it securely and tightly in place. Place the pool noodle over the trash bag-lined top edge of the bucket.

After each use of your bucket, sprinkle a handful of some dry absorption materials over the interior of the bucket. When your bucket becomes full, remove the pool noodle, tie and remove the trash bag, and replace it with a new trash bag. 

Composting Your Waste

You can also make and use your own toilet buckets to mulch the waste in the bucket so you can fertilize your garden soil. This system eliminates any bacteria and other harmful organisms from the waste during the composting process. You will need to build to composting toilet buckets: one for urine and one for feces, and you will also need extra storage buckets to help compost some of the waste. If you were to combine the two together, any bacteria and organisms in the feces will contaminate the urine, as feces takes longer to compost to make it safe for adding to soil.

Use the above instructions to build your toilets, sprinkling the urine with newspaper, sawdust, or straw after each use. When your urine toilet is full, tie up and remove the trash bag from inside, placing a new bag inside the bucket. Wait for the bag's contents to be come safe before you dump it into the soil. In a warm climate, the urine will be safe for use in the soil within approximately 15 days. In a cold climate, it will take over three months.

Urine contains nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, making it beneficial for the soil. And because the high acidic levels in urine, it comes out of your body and the pH will quickly increase, destroying any pathogens within the urine.

For the feces bucket, sprinkle dry material of straw, leaves, sawdust, or wood chips after each use. When the bucket is full, place the lid on its contents in and place it in a sunny area for at least one year. The heat from the sun on the bucket will increase the interior temperature to kill any pathogens and compost the material inside.

Use this information to help you create your own toilet and composting bucket to use. For more information, visit websites like http://www.roadrunnerwastenm.com.


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