The Beauty of the Dry Ecological Toilet

This unassuming structure might look like any old latrine in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, but it isn’t. This little beauty is the dry ecological toilet, and I’ll tell you why it’s Mary’s Featured Development Project of the Week*.

(Rita and Denise will use this toilet as soon as the door is installed.)

Unlike conventional latrines, the dry toilet, as you can guess, does not use water. You take a seat, attend to your business, and the toilet does the rest: urine is whisked away in a funnel (an old clorox bottle fitted with hose), and the poop falls to its graceful end in a chamber at the bottom. When you’re finished, you drop in one cup of dry material such as ash, sawdust, or those old rice husks you’ve got lying around, and the feces begins to decompose immediately. Six months after the last deposit, your waste has been converted to 100% safe and organic compost that can be used for most crops and is especially lovely for nutrient-poor Amazonian soil. To take advantage of the nitrogen-rich urine (most farmers have to buy nitrogen supplements), you can collect it in a jug and dilute it with water to fertilize your garden.

When I describe the dry toilet to most people, they listen interestedly but with a scrunched-up nose and then say, “Wow, sounds cool. But it must stink!” I’ve used several of these, including one in the most lush bathroom I’ve ever visited, and I can attest to the fact that they don’t. In fact, my flush toilet in Tena, hooked up to one of the worst (and undoubtedly polluting) sewage systems in the area, often stinks the way one would expect a dry toilet to smell. Because the feces starts to dry out and decompose immediately (one of the reasons for separating the urine and “flushing” with ash or sawdust), the dry toilet doesn’t cause the nose to wrinkle.

Contrast a clean, odorless, compost-producing toilet with the others we have in the campo around here: flush toilets that are usually built above a dirt pit (euphemistically called a “septic tank”, though we are conspicuously absent any RotoRooter services), sometimes connected to a water source, and sometimes not. You can imagine how many times you’ll want to use that toilet when there is no water to flush away what’s down there, particularly in a tropical jungle climate. Even if it can be flushed away, it will often come right back up in a flood.

So in the name of health, not to mention the environment (the toilets also trap and reduce methane gas emissions), we’ve helped the Kichwa community of Cuya Loma build twelve of these, eleven for individual houses and one for the kindergarten.

The best part of this project is that the community has taken charge. Occasionally they’ve needed my help in haggling with hardware stores and the City of Tena to get supplies and coordinating with the toilet designer, Chris Canaday, but overall they’ve done the lion’s share of the work and kept internal community politics to a minimum.

(Bending steel frames to make the ceramic and cement floors)

They’ve even convened a “toilet committee” to manage the project, which includes regular household inspections and an environmental education curriculum for the kids (I hope to post some cute pictures from the classes.) In a region where paternalism is rampant and everyone participates in a system of handouts, the fact that the people of Cuya Loma pulled it together to plan and implement their own project may be even more dazzling and inspiring a feat than the beautiful dry toilet itself.

If you want to learn more about dry toilets (I never thought I'd be so interested either!), you might start here.


*If in some parallel universe it were possible to do one development project a week. Why in this universe things move so slowly is the topic for another blog, or a book.