A Brief Look at the New Eco Toilets - Part II

In part I of this 2-part series, I talked about the reason why there was a recent surge of interest on the part of toilet manufacturers in producing so-called "eco toilets". Basically, this was sparked by a 1992 law that stated that a toilet was required to use less than 1.6 gallons of water for flushing.

In the first article, I gave a brief explanation of some of the types of eco toilets that were introduced in response to the law. The toilets mentioned were only the varieties that still use water for flushing. However, there are more radical toilet designs that use little or no water at all.

A compost toilet compacts and dehydrates solid waste, and turns it into compost. This can safely be used as a fertilizer for home gardens.

The urine-separating toilet is a modification of the compost toilet which separates liquid and solid waste. This allows the urine, which is rich in nutrients, to be used directly as fertilizer.

An incinerating toilet allows all waste material to drop into a holding tank, where is it burned up immediately. ( There are safeguards to ensure that the incinerator does not cause any personal injury. ) This process, however, renders the residue useless as a fertilizer.

The biological toilet, or biolet adds a small amount of water to the waste, which is then slowly passed through a bacteria-containing substance. This decomposes the waste matter into non-toxic substances. At the present time, this type of toilet is quite expensive, so it is not very widely used in the United States.

Squat toilets, just as the name suggests, require the user to squat over a hole in the floor. A small amount of water is used to flush the waste out of the hole, using a siphoning effect. This kind of toilet is quite common in third-world countries, and is actually quite sanitary, since no part of your body actually touches the toilet itself.

Although you may be somewhat repelled by some of the features of these waterless toilets, they have been thoroughly tested, and pose no threat to either the user of the machine, or the user of the resulting products. Hopefully, the cost of some of these new eco toilets will go down, as they come into greater use.

For lots more information on these and other green toilets, please check out the author's website, shown in the next paragraph.