Colorado’s Long’s Peak is a, relatively speaking, accessible 14er. As such, it gets quite a bit of traffic. Quite a bit of human waste too, as you’d imagine. So, the National Park Service teamed with the University of Colorado, Denver’s Colorado Building Workshop to design outhouses that work more efficiently, to keep rangers from constantly having to service the toilets, reducing the impact of waste overall.
And, hey, may as well make them aesthetically pleasing too, which the architects at the CBW did. They did such a good job, in fact, this week, the outhouses were awarded the “Small Projects Award” by the American Institue of Architects. The prize goes to buildings less than 5,00 square feet in size.
There are four outhouses in the project—one at Chasm Junction, one at Chasm Meadow, and two at Boulder Field, which sit above 12,000 feet, a spectacular setting for when nature calls. They’re made to deal with the incredible winds up there too, designed to handle wind speeds of well over 200 miles per hour.
They’re simple open-air structures, composed of a kind of steel cage filled with rocks collected from nearby. Took only a week to build the outhouses too, thanks to a pre-fab design. Plenty of air flow, handy and appreciated. The waste doesn’t need to be collected by rangers either. Here’s how they work.
I like the look, but no mention on how they deal with the waste. Composting, fly out?
The system is a bit in the weeds to describe thoroughly, but good point. Waste does not need to be flown out. Will update post with this link: https://www.toilettech.com/
I’ve used that bad boy a few times now, it really is pretty slick looking up there in the boulder field.
Hey! Thanks Justin. Yep, these toilets were a collaborative design that started with the Toilet Tech urine diversion seat called the BTW (Behind the Wall). Humans are the only mammal to pee on their poo. Squint your eyes and see a deer taking a dump in the forest… yep, pee hits the ground here and turds fall over there (they actually rarely pee and poo at the same time..). But when humans started living in cities, we invented the toilet to collect, contain, and remove all the waste (to the river nearby). The trend stuck and today, we like to pee and poo into the same toilet hole. In the absence of flush water, the mixture of pee and poo is a terrible and unnatural mess. Urea in our urine, in the presence of fecal bacteria, breaks down rapidly into ammonia which smells terrible and is toxic to all forms of life (ammonia is used as a commercial disinfectant). So now all the poop in these mixed stream systems is all sludgy and suffering with ammonia toxicity so nothing will eat it. And the urine, which was sterile leaving the bladder and rich with plant nutrients is now rife with fecal matter and low level E.coli that has not yet died by ammonia toxification.
OK.. so the point of that ramble is that in order to mimic the functioning natural world and bring human’s do-do in line, we must separate human urine from fecal matter. There are a few means to do this but the only system viable for high use public sites is our mechanical urine diverting conveyor. Nothing else does the trick. Here’s how it works: urine flows down the conveyor belt to a shallow tray and is treated by natural soil for nutrient uptake. Solids at the Longs toilets go up the belt by means of a foot pedal crank, and they drop into small stiff sided sacks. Llamas directed by NPS staff trek up into the Wilderness zone every few weeks to collect the bags and back them out for proper disposal in a waste water treatment plant.
In other sites with soil and plants, solid human waste and toilet paper can be consumed by bugs that live in the soil. These bugs eat feces from other mammals and they do it really fast. We have had one toilet at Smith Rocks State park for 5 years and it has not been emptied once. A conventional composting toilet with mixed waste and woodchips has been emptied 20 times, removing over 30,000 lbs of non-composted crap and urine soaked wood chips.
Source separation of high nutrient urine from pathogen rich feces is the #1 objective in a waterless setting. In the future there will be much interest placed on urine and the valuable and recoverable phosphorus and nitrogen within it.
NOTE: people can use this toilet however they please.. standing, sitting, whilst doing downward dog.. you name it. Other urine diversion toilets need to have men sitting to pee and some don’t work for kids (anatomical but hole distance issues). We think the solution needs to work in 100% of locations without any more instructions than your iphone has (foot pedal, press 5x after you deuce). We’ve sold over 200 of these units to some of the most extreme sites on the planet, have plans to equip the Everest trek, and want more challenges. Please reach out.
Check out this bitchin’ outhouse in a remote Califirnia trout camp my buddy, Mark Gangi, designed. IMG_5498.jpeg
From the product description – ” … Nothing else does the trick. Here’s how it works: urine flows down the conveyor belt to a shallow tray and is treated by natural soil for nutrient uptake …” WAIT! Stop right there! That’s right, it is a trick, that’s misleading information. Urine is salty. There’s also not a lot of natural soil at 12,000 feet. Adding a public outhouse’s amount of urine to the same soil will kill it with salinity. Go ahead, let 50 or 100 mountain climbers pee in the same spot on your nice healthy lawn for a couple of days. If you are mimicking the natural world of deer, as suggested, then pee and poo are dispersed randomly over a wide area and seldom in the same place unless you are marking your territory, or a llama. If you are planning to treat urine with natural soil at 12,000’, you are going to have to import the stuff (at enormous expense), or let it run out and soak away on or under the rocks. The soak-away plume at that volume then becomes a threat to any nearby groundwater. Soil organisms are most active above 50 degrees (F) Below that, they are sluggish and below freezing they are dormant. Not much treatment then. Same goes for decomposition of the poo. If it’s colder that 40 (F), it does’t decompose. It’s cold a lot up at 12,000’. I’ll bet you a pint of ice cream that the holding tank out back will have a lot of poo in it trying really hard to decompose, but not doing a very good job of it.
In my opinion, the conveyor concept is good idea that deserves to stay that way. Let’s refrain from the niceties. Point one: Shit sticks. As soon as that conveyor gets a few decent skid marks on the thing you will have cross contamination, aka pathogens, mixing into your liquid contributions. Point two: People who pee standing up on what is for all practical purposes a flat conveyor surface, will splatter, If you are old like me, then the splattering will be less, but if you are young, like mountain climbers, then splattering is more enthusiastic. Urgency is a tremendous motivator, but, if I need to sit, I am not motivated by pee splatter bouncing off of what has been embossed onto the conveyor from the last few visitors, whether you know them or not. Point three: Not all poo is solid, especially after a feed of freeze fried beans. Expect drainage into the pee funnel. Point four: because I have had several decades of working with a variety of composting toilets in the back country, I will triple-promise you that eventually, and on a regular if unpredictable interval, some well meaning but not well thinking person is going to toss or drop some object in the thing that they did not eat, and it is going to jam a moving part. If there is no maintenance person around to unjam the conveyor those who follow will be up Schmidt’s Creek.
It’s a very clever building and great idea to use natural materials found on site. More people should build that way. Urine Diversion is a great idea and people should be educated about it as a sanitation option for the future – for example – http://www.richearthinstitute.org. Also as the need to recycle agricultural nutrients, especially phosphorous, becomes more crucial. Trust me, I am not the kind of person who believes nothing should ever be done for the first time, but, in a public setting, UD needs to be done with the highest level of care and concern for pharmaceuticals and toxins. It is different at home, because you cannot infect yourself with something you already have.
Ben, I’m heading up there July 4,5,6 next month. If you’re in the area, come join me and see for your self. These are scattered around Colorado, OR, WA with a few in MT, and I’m happy to see if I can coordinate a visit to a site that is close to you. You sound pretty knowledgeable and keen.
Geoff