our project gets some press

Stuff Happening Now, an excellent UK blog about good ideas, has written up the Humble Pile project. Check it out!

first barrel pickup!

The other day held a momentous achievement: we picked up the first round of barrels. Thanks! They are currently seasoning happily at several undisclosed locations w/in our friendly city. Exciting updates to follow! Temperature readings! Air-introduction reports! Soil tests! Yay!

the radical vs. the loaded in South Africa

From the Times

"Radical eco-hippies in California are advocating the mass adoption of municipal bucket toilet systems, some even making their own crude lavatories from jugs and insulated wooden chambers. But self-composting toilets are nothing like the dreaded long-drop of your nightmares. Modern, commercially manufactured models look and operate just like a standard toilet, using a high-powered jet of water or air to break up your deposits, and an assortment of worms, bugs and micro-organisms to break down the material into "humanure" that is suitable for use in the garden. A top-of-the-range Envirolet FlushSmart composting toilet system will set you back about R30000."

Perfect breakfast

This is quite possibly the most perfect breakfast ever: heirloom tomatoes and cukes grown in homemade dirt.

poop to veggies

Finally, we've reaped our first season's backyard bounty, grown in soil fortified with super-compost from our humanure, yard clippings, kitchen scraps, straw and sawdust pile. Oh, and there's a little junk mail and cardboard in there too, and even a very ripe octopus, which was rescued from a trash bin and put to better use in our pile. The pile was added to for around a year, then let rot for another. Since this was our own personal pile, we didn't bother testing the finished compost for pathogenic activity, as we shall with the contents of Humble Pile's blue barrels. We did a sight and smell test: dark, with a very lovely dusky soil scent.

pile beginning:


pile full!


first radishes:


first beans:


first beet!

Happy Earth Day

Here's a good Frontline documentary about the gutted Clean Water Act that aired last night: how Nixon was forced to create the EPA, how Regan de-boned it, how aquatic dead zones -the massive, life-free, oxygen-starved areas in the oceans- are spreading world-wide, why agricultural runoff (see industrial farming of livestock) is such a terrific problem, and how the peeps don't seem to mind. Seems that massive amounts of raw chicken manure added to the waterways is a really bad thing.

"I think the '70s was the high-water mark for idealism and for optimism and belief that anything was possible, and this decade has been much more realistic. The easy stuff, to the extent there was ever easy stuff, that got done in the '70s. We got the big factories with their big pipes discharging into Puget Sound under control, treating their wastewater so that it wasn't harmful. ...

But in this decade, we are into an era of diffuse sources, where the sources aren't a few big pipes, but they are every car on the highway, every farm field, every person's lawn. They contribute very little individually, but taken together, they are the big, uncontrolled sources.

...

It's about the way we all live. And unfortunately we are all polluters. I am; you are; all of us are, because we live in an industrialized society that puts us there. And all of us have to strive every day to make those differences. And our job now, in a lot of cases, is giving people the information and the options to change the way they impact … the world around them."

Our sewer line argues for dry toilets.

Like a lot of people living in older houses with clay-pipe sewer line, we've occasionally had to call the plumber over the years (ours is good, if you need a recommendation) in order to ream the roots out of the age-weakened, perforated pipe sections. Since we've been dry-toileting, I've been worrying about this a lot less, which turns out to have been a mistake. Against the advice of our plumber, we've shied away from dumping the acid foam products down the flush toilet in order to periodically eat away at the ever-clogging root balls. And until the moment in the future when we can afford to completely grey-water our old plumbing, the shower and sink (and yeah, sometimes the flusher, under certain circumstances) all use the sewer line still. Until now, the root problems have been minor. But now, apparently, we've got some major excavations to attempt, through concrete things. The worst.

Bring back the husk!

American taste for soft toilet roll 'worse than driving Hummers'

From the Guardian:

The New York Times reported a 40% rise in sales of luxury brands of toilet paper in 2008. Paper companies are anxious to keep those percentages up, even as the recession bites. And Reuters reported that Kimberly-Clark spent $25m in its third quarter on advertising to persuade Americans against trusting their bottoms to cheaper brands.

But Kimberly-Clark, which touts its green credentials on its website, rejects the idea that it is pushing destructive products on an unwitting American public.

Dave Dixon, a company spokesman, said toilet paper and tissue from recycled fibre had been on the market for years. If Americans wanted to buy them, they could.

"For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides," Dixon said. "It's the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect."

Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue. Dixon said the company used products from sustainbly farmed forests in Canada.

Americans already consume vastly more paper than any other country — about three times more per person than the average European, and 100 times more than the average person in China.

Read more.

No-mix Future?

"The Zhang family toilet is not the perfect answer, as it still uses some water, though 80 percent less than a regular flush toilet uses. But at least it’s the result of someone asking the right questions."

From the NYT editorial page, by Rose George, an uber-authority on "the global politics of defecation." Check out her book here.