Besides turning humanure into compost, our bucket toilets help us save water, a precious resource in a semi-arid area like the Cederberg. This is how you use them.
All human waste, including menstrual blood and the toilet paper provided can be deposited. Please only use the toilet paper provided and dispose of nothing else in the bucket.
Use the sawdust to cover your deposits and any visible toilet paper. The rule of thumb is that “if you can’t see it, you can’t smell it.”
This step is important for fly control. Please also dust any saw dust off the seat before you leave.
Full buckets are emptied into slatted wooden bins at our waste centre, and then buckets are washed and put back to work. Because each bucket is topped with sawdust mixed with a little finished compost, the contents are inoculated with beneficial microbes from the start. In the wooden bins, the material is treated with a microbe-rich “tea” and then rests for at least 18 months. This slow, passive phase relies on time, warmth and micro-life to turn everything into stable humus.
When the first phase is complete, we open the bins and mix the material (now smelling like soil) with fresh grass cuttings to kick off a secondary, hot composting cycle. We turn the heap once or twice a week to bring in oxygen so that heat-loving bacteria can ramp the temperature, speeding up the breakdown and neutralising any remaining pathogens. Finally, we add small doses of volcanic rock dust (for trace minerals) and biochar, which locks carbon in the ground and gives microbes a long-term home. The finished compost is used to grow trees and other plants but never food crops.
