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The New York Times spent 36 hours in Telluride Colorado and they stopped by Alpino Vino wine bar at the top of Gold Hill. Undoubtedly while they were there they used the Clivus composting toilets that accommodate the highest wine bar on Earth.

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Source: New York Times

It may seem paradoxical to New Englanders who spent June carrying umbrellas to work every day to hear that Dighton has a desalination plant that converts saltwater into fresh, and that there are more such plants on the way in the area. “We’re hardly Saudi Arabia,” says Bob Zimmerman, executive director of the nonprofit environmental group the Charles River Watershed Association. “To find ourselves in a situation where cities feel compelled to turn sea water into potable drinking water in a state that gets 4 feet of rain a year is absurd.”

The problem, Zimmerman maintains, is that because of sprawl — which paves over natural areas that could be replenishing ground-water supplies — and overuse, even normally damp New England is threatened with water shortages. Already, three dozen communities in Eastern Massachusetts have mandatory or voluntary outdoor water-use restrictions.

Better engineering in cities and towns is a big part of the long-term answer, but conservation is key, especially in the short term, says Zimmerman. The message of conservation has been slow to reach the New England states, but these Massachusetts residents are a little ahead of the curve.

Brimming Barrels Scott Jenney admits his initial motive for conserving water wasn’t completely altruistic. “When we first moved into this house in 1986,” he says, “I had a garden and was using town water for it. I was getting some high water bills.”
Jenney, an electrical engineer and self-described tinkerer, had been living on his own since age 15; now 51, he says he “had to learn how to be frugal and resourceful.” His wife, Lida, a child-care provider, grew up in an environmentally sensitive family.

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Source: Boston.com (Boston Globe)

Laura Allen, a 33-year-old teacher from Oakland, California, has a famous toilet. To be honest, it’s actually a box, covered in decorative ceramic tiles, sitting on the cement floor of her bathroom like a throne. No pipes lead to or from it; instead, a bucket full of shavings from a local wood shop rests on the box next to the seat with a note instructing users to add a scoopful after making their “deposit.” Essentially an indoor outhouse, it’s a composting toilet, a sewerless system that Allen uses to collect her household’s excrement and transform it into a rich brown material known to fans as “humanure.”

Allen is a founding member of an activist group devoted to the end of sewage as we know it. Her toilet recently made an appearance in the Los Angeles Times — which might explain why she didn’t seem surprised when I emailed her out of the blue to ask if I could use it.

Lifting the seat, she showed me a seal of insulating foam tape she’d put around its edges to prevent odors from wafting into the bathroom and then pointed out a funnel-like contraption hanging from the front of the toilet that diverted urine away from crap. The separated waste collected in two containers sitting several feet below the toilet seat, accessible through a hatch cut into the side of the house: the urine flowed into a plastic jug formerly used for olive oil, the feces into a bucket labeled “feta cheese.”  A year from now, once it’s composted, Allen and her roommates will use this excrement to fertilize their fruit trees.

To most Americans, Allen’s system would seem eccentric, if not downright weird. But while feta cheese buckets are relatively new creations, humans have used shit as fertilizer since the dawn of agriculture — the nitrogen in our urine is an excellent fertilizer, and feces, itself nutrient-rich, is a great soil amendment. It wasn’t until the turn of the 20th century that water-based sewer systems became commonplace in the United States; after that, “sewer farms,” where crops were irrigated with untreated wastewater, were commonplace. Even today, the majority of the world’s population doesn’t have access to flush toilets, making us the anomaly, rather than the norm.

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Source: Grist.org (Grist)

The water toilet is truly one of the greatest miracles of modern life, a frothy disappearing act; now you see it… now you don’t. But washing human waste away requires huge sewage treatment infrastructures in cities, and extensive home septic systems for rural dwellers. Compost toilets, though in their essence as old as human civilization, have evolved to a point of technological sophistication whereby they tackle the minutiae of composting details to create optimal conditions for recycling human waste.

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Source: popsci.com (Popular Science)