Taking the Scenic Route to Composting
Why we're pausing on our compost (but not our mission)
Written by Kaitlin Louise Pettit, PhD, CEO of Toilet Equity
I got into Toilet Equity because of the compost, and stayed for everything else.
My background is in environmental ethics and one of my biggest loves in life is gardening and the outdoors. I wrote my dissertation on the responsibilities corporations have to give back to the people they affect, coming at it from an environmental justice angle.
So, when Toilet Equity needed to pause our composting endeavor, it was hard for me. It took a while for me to get on board, and I was particularly worried we would lose our wonderful employees and supporters who value the compost as much as I do.
That’s why I want to tell you about a current problem TE is facing, our immediate solution, and our long-term goals. I want to reassure you – as much as I reassure myself every day – that this pause is temporary. And, I want to invite you to fight the environmental justice fight with me, with compost as our battleground.
The Problem
We’re out of compost space. Like, plum out, nowhere to go.
But we don’t want that to mean our users also have nowhere to go. We’re committed to our primary objective: providing sustainable, dignified places for people to go to the bathroom. The sustainable part there is crucial: both environmentally sustainable – standard toilets and even portapotties use a lot of water, as well as other chemicals, and produce waste products that have to be dealt with – as well as sustainable for the long-haul. So, our toilets aren’t going anywhere.
The good news is, TE also has a place to go. We’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with Roice Hurst Animal Society to use some of their land in Grand Junction for a new, larger compost site that will be able to accommodate all the deposits from our toilets in the near future. (The animal lover in me is also incredibly excited that they want to learn to compost the deposits from their animals, and the nerd in me is dreaming of the spreadsheets I’ll get to make comparing the nutrient data from animal and human compost.)
The problem there is permitting. Because of some jurisdictional red tape, getting the permit to compost at the new site is taking longer than we’d hoped. It will likely be over a year before we’ll be able to build our first pile there. We have a plan (you’ll hear more about that in the coming months) and we’re working through the red tape – which, fittingly, doesn’t compost nearly as fast as the rest of what goes into our toilets.
But what do we do in the meantime to keep our toilets open?
The Immediate Solution
Persigo to the rescue! We’re partnering with Persigo, the wastewater treatment facility in Grand Junction, Colorado. They’re allowing us to dump our bins at their site, and are even waiving the dump fee for us as a nonprofit with a trial program this year. Doing so was a learning curve – we’re not dealing with wastewater, after all, but bins of solids – but we’ve got a good system in place now (stay tuned for a tour!).
Along with the pause on the compost, this was initially a hard pill for me to swallow. The blog I’d originally planned for September was going to show you how little water our toilets use, especially compared to standard toilets and even portapotties. We’re proud of how effective our system is in the high desert we call home, and how adaptable it is to different climates. So to pivot to a system that would naturally add a lot more water back into our process was hard for me.
As we’ve begun to work with Persigo, though, we’ve gotten to see the benefits to a system like theirs in a community. As much as I’d like for everyone to use a compost toilet, that just isn’t feasible with the way our society is currently structured. The amount of land you’d need and the work hours that would go into it would be astounding. Doing it on a household scale isn’t feasible either: each house would still need a surprising amount of land, it wouldn’t be on a scale that would allow the piles to build temperature fast enough, and our society isn’t set up for the personal time and training that type of system would require. Besides all that, it sure is nice to walk into a room in your house, close the door, do your business, and flush it away. That’s a community-scale solution at its best.
Nevertheless, we still believe our composting system has a place, and it is particularly helpful for the individuals and locations that we serve. We can put our toilets in places no other kind of toilet can service: along riverbanks, in parking lots, and even in individual RVs and tents (stay tuned for that program rollout!). We can also adapt to various climates and resources within a community, changing the carbon source based on local availability and adjusting hydration as needed.
Finally, we can show that “waste” need not be wasted. That’s at the heart of how I live my life and why I got into TE in the first place: everything has value, and making use of that is how we preserve the best environment possible for our kids and grandkids. The flip side of that is also one of my hardest life lessons: pioneering the hard way.
The Environmental Justice Fight
When I say I do things the hard way, boy do I mean it. I was the only vegetarian in a tiny ranching school growing up. I didn’t send my kid to a babysitter for more than the first two years of her life. I grow most of the vegetables my family eats in a year, and preserve them all summer so we can enjoy them come winter. (If you want to hear more about doing things the hard way and my motivation for joining TE, you can listen to our partner business’s podcast episode.)
My husband first pointed out this tendency of mine when we lived in Emigration Canyon behind the University of Utah. Each day, I got to walk out my front door and onto a deer trail that wound up the canyon wall. Most days, it was just me and my dog, but sometimes my partner would be able to come with us. One time, he asked me why we were taking such a hard trail.
“What do you mean,” I said, leaning forward to keep my footing on the deer trail that went straight up the ridge of the hill, “where else would we go?”
“I bet there’s another trail that winds along that ravine and is a lot less steep,” said my Ravenclaw.
Sure enough, he found it, and it was an easier – if longer – route. And, sure enough, in true Gryffindor fashion, most days I still took the route that led me straight up the ridge. I enjoyed the view from there, and I liked the feeling of accomplishment I got each time when I looked back at where I’d been.
Those are the two paths Toilet Equity is on right now. We’re currently detouring to Persigo on the Ravenclaw path: the smarter, sometimes easier route that still gets us to where we need to go. We’re also forging the Gryffindor path into uncharted territory, pioneering a path for human “waste” composting regulations in Colorado.
You’ll hear more about this in the coming months, but the short version is that we’re trying to get this new site to be a pilot project to show that human “waste” composting can be done safely and effectively, and that it should be a regulatory viable option for those who want it. Getting there is going to mean a massive group effort: we’re going to need to rely on civil engineering volunteers to draw up the plans for the concrete pad we’ll pour and the drains we’ll install, legal volunteers to help us draft regulations, and public health volunteers to help us test our materials, not to mention all the donors and supporters who will help us rally the funds to pay for it all.
It’s a hard push (pun intended). But I think it’s worth it. We’re revolutionizing the way that waste is thought about in our community, we’re bringing safety and dignity to everyone in our community, and we’re working on revolutionary ways to save the environment as we do.
Changing systems isn’t neat or easy. Right now, Colorado’s rules are written with one solution in mind: send all waste into the wastewater stream. At Toilet Equity, we believe composting should be an option too — and we’re working to prove it can be safe, sustainable, and transformative. While we wait for the permits to expand to a larger composting site, we’re playing by the rules at Persigo. It’s not our destination, but it’s part of the journey toward reshaping the rules themselves.
Thank you for hiking the hard trail with us. I know we’ll love the view from our new compost site when we get there.
