We have installed dozens of waterless toilets across South Africa and the UK for customers ranging from individuals to camp sites, community and voluntary groups, public institutions and private businesses.

Our attractive waterless toilets are all handmade on our farm with locally sourced sustainable timber. We offer eco-toilets with disabled access, single units, multiple compost toilet units, and a range of low-cost and DIY compost toilet solutions.

Urine Separation is the key!

Keeping urine separate is usually the key to a successful composting toilet. Our toilets all come with a urine separator, which is used to divert the urine away from the solids into a separate container or soak away. This keeps the solid waste odour free and optimises the composting process. For the process to work aerobically, moisture levels need to be controlled: too dry, and the mass decomposes slowly or not at all; too wet and anaerobic organisms thrive, creating undesirable smells.

The second magic ingredient: The Soak

A soak is a source of carbon, like sawdust, straw, hay, shredded paper or earth. Addition of the right amount of soak is important for good decomposition because bacteria like to eat a balanced diet of carbon and nitrogen. Human waste contains a lot of nitrogen so a good amount of carboniferous material is needed to avoid the bacteria giving off excess nitrogen in the form of ammonia, which is what is smelly. So you just need to keep a bucket of soak next to the loo and drop a handful into the toilet after each use.

The Wheelie Bin System

Many of our ready-made compost toilets feature the ubiquitous wheelie bin – an innovative and hassle-free system for composting human manure. Using a wheelie bin may at first sound strange, but if we were to hire a team of designers to come up with the perfect receptacle to hold humanure then after two years and a huge budget they would come back with the wheelie bin!

Wheelie bins are easy to move, watertight, rodent proof and cheap, which makes storage and emptying a doddle.

Once you have filled your first bin then you replace it with a second bin. When this is full, you empty the first bin (which should have started to compost nicely by now) into a standard garden 1m x 1m compost box that allows the air to circulate and aerobic composting to happen more rapidly. Here the final stage of the compost process happens for up to a year. Each subsequent bin is added on top. The waste is reduced from 100% solids to 6% in one – two years.

The advantage of the wheelie bin system is that you can rotate the bins as quickly as they fill up. More people mean more bins. On average, using the composting toilet every day, it takes one adult 150 days to fill up a bin. So a group of six people would fill a bin in about 25 days, and a group of 15 people would fill a bin in about two weeks. If the toilet is used only occasionally, it will take much longer to fill the bin.