There are currently more than six billion people in the world, and this number continues to grow every second of every day. For centuries humans have used water to remove waste from our direct contact. In the 1800’s the unsound practice of dumping our faeces into the nearest body of water began. The flushing toilet served to remove our faeces from our sight and smell by putting them into a complex system of underground pipes. Every enthusiastic camper knows not to shit upstream but our society gives us no choice but to turn our rivers, bays and oceans into cesspools. Societies determination to ignore our own waste products threatens to bury us with the very things we choose to ignore.
Below I will try to outline some of the alternatives available to the common Water Closet type water flush toilet.
Oil Recirculating Toilets don’t use water. They are closed loop systems where mineral oil is used to flush wastes away rather than water. Oil and waste is collected in a storage tank where the waste sinks to the bottom and the oil floats to the top. The oil is then filtered off from the top of the tank, filtered and fed back into the cistern ready to be reused. Meanwhile
· They are suitable for use in remote areas where there is no power or services.
After learning about the alternatives available to the traditional toilet I believe there are alternatives available that should be carefully considered. Where the challenge lies is to make the technology appropriate to fit into the high quality environment society is accustomed to. To do this we need to break societies affinity with destructive technological devices and create harmony with nature. Sadly my feelings are that we will not be proactive in changing societies sanitary systems to work in equilibrium with our ecosystem. We will be akin to a Rabbit startled in the headlamps of change and only when it is too late and the days of the oil age are over we will be forced to reassemble our current settlement patterns into coherent biological systems forcing the use of composting systems.