Customer Reviews

The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water

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Most farmers and gardeners fertilize soil using manure from the many animals except humans. Because of our diet, humanure is unsurpassed in nutrients. Asians have used it for thousands of years. Generations of families using flush toilets have resulted in psychological negativity--the yuck factor. So humanure is mostly wasted and goes into sewage treatment plants or septic systems, causing much unnecessary expense and pollution of groundwater. The most commonsense treatment of humanure is to collect it, compost it, and then use it for fertilizer for ornamentals and those plants that fruit above-ground: fruit trees, tomatoes, peppers, beans and the like. Humanure composted for a year is indistinguishable from rich soil. Van der Ryn provides here the why and the how.

With a title like "Toilet Papers" and from a distinguished eco-architect like Sim Van der Ryn, I needed no intro or review to buy a copy of this little, but well researched historical over-view of effluent mitigation and current eco-friendly toilet design.

This book is filled with good line drawings and photographs to depict everything from the historical perspective to the current dry toilets and their construction.

The book starts out with:
"Throughout this book, you will find the word "waste" used to refer to those raw materials-feces and urine-your body passes on to make energy available to some other form of life. This is what you give back to the earth. The idea of waste, of something unusable, reveals an incomplete understanding of how things work.
Nature admits no waste. Nothing is left over; everything is joined in the spiral of life. Perhaps other cultures know this better than we, for they have no concept of, no word for, waste". And under that thought provoking consideration of resource cycles, there is:

"A sound man is good at salvage, at seeing nothing is lost"- Lao Tze, 500 B.C.

The intro is by Wendell Berry, farmer, novelist, poet. He posits that "modern" effluent mitigation is as insane as drinking right from an un-flushed toilet: "It is not inconceivable that some psychiatrist would ask me knowingly why I wanted to mess up my drinking water in the first place". Indeed.

After the fascinating human waste history lessons, we are given a short crash-course on the biology of waste, then it's on to the fruit of the book: dry composting toilet designs and their efficacy. This is in good detail and makes for a complete handbook on waterless toilet design.

Finally, there is the Epilogue and I would be amiss in my review if I did not reveal a little taste of it: [Any technology divorced from the whole of nature tends to produce a condition that poet Robert Graves calls "mechanarchy": the perfection of technological means to produce a chaotic sterile environment. The current technology of "waste disposal" (the term reveals the syndrome) is still fighting a war against nature, built on fragments of 19th century science not yet integrated into an understanding of life processes as a unified, but cyclical, whole."] True enough!
Sim Van der Ryn has produced a gem of proper waste recycling in this informing little book. His website is well worth a visit also.

An informative companion to "Toilet Papers" is "The Humanure Handbook" by Joseph Jenkins- a how-to on safely composting one's excrement back into a nutrient rich amendment for the vegetable garden instead of flushing it away as waste.

As the world ponders how we will all survive as unpolluted water becomes scarcer and scarcer, eventually one has to ask, 'why do we go to the bathroom in a bowl of fresh drinking water????'

Please don't tell me that it's 'because that's the way we've always done it'.

It's time for this book.

Hopefully, it will be read by people who have the brains and guts and good-natured cleverness to actually do something cool and constructive and environmentally sound about these things.

Most farmers and gardeners fertilize soil using manure from the many animals except humans. Because of our diet, humanure is unsurpassed in nutrients. Asians have used it for thousands of years. Generations of families using flush toilets have resulted in psychological negativity--the yuck factor. So humanure is mostly wasted and goes into sewage treatment plants or septic systems, causing much unnecessary expense and pollution of groundwater. The most commonsense treatment of humanure is to collect it, compost it, and then use it for fertilizer for ornamentals and those plants that fruit above-ground: fruit trees, tomatoes, peppers, beans and the like. Humanure composted for a year is indistinguishable from rich soil. Van der Ryn provides here the why and the how.

I bought this book to replace a previous copy that went misssing. Excellent info on composting toilets and supposedly alternative waste disposal systems. Brings home the point that our so called normal systems are not always the best.

Wise use of water was a critical issue three decades ago when this book was first published. It's even more important now. The Toilet Papers is clear, simple, specific, and has one of the best book titles ever. Wendell Berry's elegantly eloquent foreword provide what is still the most succinct reasoning for WHY we should stop flushing, transporting, treating, then re-transporting our human excretions.


Van Der Ryn describes how to make your own composting toilet, as well as reviewing packaged systems. Now there a few more (but not enough) manufacturers of packaged composting dry toilet systems, though US plumbing codes and building departments are woefully behind in approving them. Once they do, widespread adoption will be possible and is hopefully inevitable, as it will save water, money, and fossil fuels, not to mention reduce the amount of chemicals we put into our environment and thus, into our bodies.