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.

POST-PILE, or piling on...

Greetings pilers,

I've been meaning to post some initial thoughts for a while... First of all, I'm excited to be part of the nutrient loop experiment and glad that my personal waste can be a part of something other than sewage. A couple of questions that I've been wondering about: First, I store my straw outside and with the last rains, the bale got wet. I'm wondering about mold. If I cover it now, is that going to increase my chances of growing mold? Should I let the hay dry out and then cover it with a tarp? What are others doing for straw storage? One thing I've also found is that the bucket needs to be emptied before I think... You need to give things a little bit of room to drop! Anyone else had funny encounters with clearance problems? Also, I haven't been wetting my sawdust at all. Is that a problem?
One of the things I've noticed in the last couple of weeks, only tangentially related to the nutrient loop, is how shifting habituated behavior (ie, using a bucket rather than the toilet) is such a productive way to be slightly more awake or present. Not to sound too corny... but I've really noticed that catching myself going for the toilet and then reminding myself that I want to use the bucket is an interesting exercise. More soon and pics too!

Crap Happens

We'll get around to a longer post soon, but in the meantime some photos of delivery day at our Humble compound.

nascent sawdust facilities

hey loopers,
project announcements:
1.) erik knudsen and kelly coyne, who live in echo park and keep a great blog (among other things!), now have their equipment! erik is wondering about aeration. http://www.homegrownevolution.com/

deena capparelli and claude willey who comprise the LA-based MOISTURE collective, are also equipped and are currently revving up their brand-new sawdust facilities.

can't wait to hear from any and all parties: delight, trepidation, problems, ease.

any LA household who would like to join us is invited. we will be dropping equipment weekly and hope the fun never ends. email us at info@testhole.com.

we have several more drops scheduled.

love, harry

welcome humble loopers!

This is the place to share info, make declarations, post soliloquies, questions and pictures; anything related to our exciting nutrient-looping project, Humble Pile L.A. Everyone should have received an email or phone call at this point, and we are getting into the beginning stages of this unprecedented (in our city) experiment! Woo! Post your experiences here.

an aeration query

Hey Humble Pilers,

I'm trying to solve a possible problem with the humble pile drum and I'd like your thoughts on the subject. If I were doing this on my own, I'd probably not have a bottom on the composter and I'd also have lots of air holes on the sides, that way I'd get both worms and oxygen into the pile (as per Jenkins and my non-humble food/chicken poop compost pile). I realize this would make it impossible to move. I've thought about placing a 4" drainage pipe with holes in it in the drum to bring in air as an alternative. Any thoughts? I noticed the guy on your website has a strange turning thingy that he uses (sells?) to get air in without having holes in the drum, but I'm a little skeptical.

I'll post a blog entry soon with pictures.

Best,
Erik K.

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sean has been filling his drum for awhile. what do you say to this?

erik, i'm with you about the bottomless bin idea. and clear on the need for air.

my impression, however, is that one builds the compost with enough roughage that air continues in.

but yes. that guy in arizona rotates his. hm. testhole has discussed this idea.

and...this:
we can and will drill air holes after the drums have reached their final resting spot. if they fill quickly and are transported away and aerated, that could be a clear answer.
since i'm interested in experiments that could or might lead to actual municipal applications i'm interested in solutions that would keep the drum a discrete, clean and moveable object?

you're supposed to put quite a lot of straw on the bottom of the drum as an organic "sponge" by the way. i failed to mention that at drop off.

best,
hd


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Hey all,


Sean here, to weigh in. The issue of compost aeration is a vital one, of course, the difference between a loamy result and a possible foul slurry, at least as far as barrel-composting is concerned. Oxygen must be introduced. But I'll echo Harry's mention of experimental large-scale: it all depends on whether or not you'd like to keep your barrel, or let us take it for our project's purposes. Everyone is perfectly welcome to keep their barrel, but we'd like to encourage you all to give 'em up, preferably full, and not perforated, for transport purposes. We'll do the oxy introduction later. My own barrel is currently in the seasoning stage, it's been there for about three months. It's now cooled off a lot and the volume's dropped by about 1/4. I'm about to introduce some more air by some means, perhaps a broomstick, although those fancy compost screws are neat-looking. No holes yet.

genesis

it was stumbling on this webpage about humanure composting that gave us the idea we could do this project. introducing: david omick, composter extraordinaire.

here is another page of his, more specifically about his composting (waterless) toilets.

revolutionary poop from Oregon

"We know a human made this turd, whereas we don't know if that was a campfire."



The items pictured above are coprolites, or fossilized shit, found in desert caves in the Paisley 5 Mile Ridge in South-central Oregon. Coprolites are part of a larger group of animal remains called ichnotaxa, including also gastroliths, regurgitaliths, nests, cocoons and pupal cases. One of these has maybe finally laid to rest the much-challenged date of first human colonization of North America, or the "Clovis-first" theory. The Clovis date (based on a particular kind of stone tool found in the '30s in Clovis, New Mexico and subsequently elsewhere), which has been challenged before, is now most strongly threatened by the hard evidence of ancient turds. After a new DNA extraction technique found unmistakable human DNA in samples from the Paisley coprolites (as well as certain genetic markers found only in Native American populations), the archaeologist whose students found them, Dennis Jenkins from the University of Oregon, sent samples to two different labs for radio carbon dating, and the results were identical: the excretion moment of these turds was 14,300 years ago, making them the oldest remains-based evidence of modern humans ever found in North America.

I emailed Dr. Jenkins, because I was concerned about the proximity of the shit to possible food-prep areas. He wrote back to say that feces were usually deposited in certain areas of a cave, such as cracks, pits, etc., or just outside. These were caches for later use in case of emergency, since many seeds would pass through the digestive tracts of the cave-dwellers un-digested. These could be recovered, cleaned and reconsumed. He also mentioned that the Seri indians of Sonora, Mexico refer to this practice as the second harvest.

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