If you love the ocean, you should stop pooping in toilets that empty into sewers and start pooping on Seasteads.
The flush toilets in your home are basically the same technology Queen Victoria used, and they constitute one of the greatest threats to the oceans, especially since pharmaceuticals can’t be reliably removed from wastewater.
Chris Canaday, an expert on Ecological Sanitation, wrote in Blue Frontiers’ Food and Water Report for seasteads:
“Flush toilets not only throw away huge amounts of water, but also all the nutrients found in the excrement. Every time you push that toilet lever, you deplete our agricultural soils and contribute to the formation of dead zones.”
State of the Art Report: Energy & Water
Since this rich treasure of nutrients is wasted, land-folk must get fertilizer by creating even more pollution by mining phosphate from rock and taking nitrogen from the air. Why should we get these vital nutrients from unsustainable industries when they are sustainably coming out of our bodies?
It’s easy to create toilets that are excellent for the environment. The solution is simple: Urine-diverting Dry Toilets. Here’s how it works.
Poop falls into a chamber where it is kept dry and covered with rich dry soil, and after six months in the Tropics, it stops being feces and simply becomes more rich dry soil, which will be used to cover new poop and may potentially become fertilizer on Seastead farms.
Urine, on the other hand, contains 90% of the nutrients plants need to grow, and when dispersed into soil, it transmits no diseases.
And because there is only environmental harm when poop and pee are mixed together, we only need to ensure poop and pee go in different directions.
Luckily, urine-diverting dry toilets are not a new technology. They were invented in Japan in 1950, and the experience of using one can be just as pleasant as using a standard flush toilet. There are thousands of up-scale dry toilets in Scandinavian homes and an estimated million in China.
Seasteads will restore the ancient relationship between plants and animals. We give plants organic waste, they give us food. We give them carbon dioxide, and they give us oxygen.
“Seasteading is … a grand opportunity to showcase simple, practical techniques of Sustainable Sanitation…If these techniques are inexpensive and robust, they can be replicated on a massive scale.”
– Chris Canaday
If you want to learn more, or if you want to join the first seasteading community, go to Blue-Frontiers.com and read Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity from Politicians.
Created by Joe Quirk, Jackson Sullivan, and Chris Canaday. Special thanks to Bart Roeffen.
