Recycling s***: ‘My compost toilet is like a throne’
Do you dream of living on a canal-boat but worry about the nitty gritty of being eye-to-eye, or worse, with your own s***?
David Gee, peace activist and writer, has lived on his narrowboat — Promise — for almost 21 years — and he’s found a way to take away the pain — and even enjoy the process.
During lockdown he ditched his porta potty for a hand-crafted compost toilet, the ‘products’ of which will eventually nourish the food he grows on his allotment.
Over the last two decades, the household waste recycling rate in England has increased from just 11.2 per cent to almost 50 per cent. However, England still falls short of the EU target of recycling a minimum of 50 percent of its household waste by 2020. David Gee (pictured) is one of 5,500 continuous cruisers registered by the Canal and River Trust (CRT) who manage two thousand miles of waterways in the UK.
“Living on a boat is a very low-impact lifestyle, compared to living in a house in terms of harm to the earth”, he tells me. “But it’s very difficult to recycle because the CRT don’t provide any facilities anywhere on their entire system.” Bins used by continuous cruisers, including boaters who share David’s peripatetic lifestyle, are regularly filled with plastic, glass and paper that could easily be recycled.
Recycling has become part of David’s daily routine and he is committed to it, despite the unique practical challenges he faces. His home, Promise, is a 36 foot narrowboat. She is beautiful. And she is functional, rocking a kitchen, bathroom and livingroom cum study cum bedroom — a necessity for a space of her size. Despite this, David makes recycling a priority, sometimes storing up to 10 to 12 sacks full of recycling in the bow. He saves it for when he has the chance to recycle again on a trip to Abingdon, eight miles from where he’s currently moored in Oxford, where the rules of the river and the facilities for boaters are quite different. Few others in his situation are so stalwart in this respect.
In addition to paper, card, glass, plastic and food-waste, David “puts his poo to use” rather than “sending it to the sewage farm as yet another pollutant”. He tells me, “it feels like a liberation — it’s a bit closer to how the earth would want us to be living.” Beyond serving the eco-system around him, he prefers it to its unglamorous, plastic, chemical counterpoint which — in his words — “can get pretty disgusting”.
“It’s like a throne… You spend five minutes there but you’d want to spend another five. It’s that good.”
In contrast, his handcrafted compost toilet, is “like a throne”. I can feel him smiling, even in the dark, on the roof of Promise, as he enthuses. “You spend five minutes there but you’d want to spend another five. It’s that good.” David breaks down, in some detail, the mechanics of the toilet and how it came to being. After building it himself and varnishing the marine plywood he’s used, there is little maintenance required. Essentially, he explains, “all it is is a bucket that holds the poo, and the wee goes down a separate little hole into a fuel can.”
David takes great pleasure in tending to an allotment near where he and Promise are currently moored, the self-proclaimed ‘Daviristan’ — a combination of his and his allotment partner’s names. They even have a flag, and neighbouring ‘countries’ who they trade vegetables with. Initially after building his throne, David would carefully seal the poo bag and dispose of it in a regular bin. But recently, after reading guidelines on how to do it safely, he has started composting it on his allotment. “It doesn’t carry diseases, and it will be nourishing the things that I eat.”
‘Most changes take decades. It’s a few people doing it for a very long time as a fringe activity. Everyone thinks you’re crazy. It’s all struggle, struggle, struggle, and then… it’s normal.’ David talks of how recycling has gone from something virtually unheard of to something that most families do fairly reliably. “If you said in 40 years time, everyone’s going to be separating their card and bottles and plastic into separate bins and putting it outside to get melted down and recycled it would have seemed impossible.”
“It’s no longer just go into the black sack and out of sight, out of mind. We know that if we do that it will be there for hundreds of years.”
“Recycling is a very small part of our ecological relationship”, David says. But it’s one that has become very much embedded in our society at a visceral level that needs to happen. “It’s no longer just go into the black sack and out of sight, out of mind… We know that if we do that it will be there for hundreds of years.”
Charlie Ogilvie is a Social Innovation Fellow at Year Here, a platform for professionals to test and build entrepreneurial responses to entrenched social inequality. From the back-deck of the houseboat she’s been borrowing since the start of lockdown, Charlie is working as a Social Impact Consultant for The Young Foundation, before going on to set-up and test her own social business later this year.
