For years I’ve been taking a pee jug along when I go camping. I buy a 2-gallon jug of kitty litter and keep the nice wide-mouth jug it comes in. They’re firm plastic and have a nice handle. I keep one right outside my tent for midnight pees. Way easier than hoofing all the way to the bathrooms or whatever.
This time we actually brought the pee back and added it to the compost pile! It’s like two of my hobbies finally came together after years. Huzzah!
I may not have clarified that the kitty litter is not kept in the pee jug. We have cats and just put it to use.
What about pee+biochar = carbon locked away forever?
I thought you were peeing into the kitty litter for soaking and smell purposes. Fair enough, it’s a plastic jug and the fact that kitty litter is involved is unrelated.
I mentioned char because it will cut the smell down some which I thought was related to smell issues.
Many years ago, I built a camp toilet for the ladies that was 2 buckets stacked on top of each other. The top bucket had holes drilled through and a 1/3rd full of biochar and a 5gal toilet lid attachment. The pee went through biochar and dropped into lower bucket and would cut the smell entirely. The top section would go for a week and you could unstack the buckets and tip the pee. The lower bucket also had char in it so the top bucket with the weight of a person wouldn’t stick the 2 buckets together, this layer was dumped with the pee.
Well made char is estimated to lock carbon away for hundreds to thousands of years. It doesn’t break down with regular biological methods.
Interesting - I would not have guessed that would work. I don’t totally understand the chemistry of pee stink. But it seems to develop over time. It sounds like in your rig the pee only passed through the char right after urination. It didn’t smell a day after that?
The top char would block the smell from coming out. Think “composting toilet” versus “carbon filter”. Similar rules apply.
The addition of 5-10% char to my duck pond water will cut the smell to almost zero after 4 days and that usually smells bad with plain water.
Ah I see! Well you must have been the hero of the hour, giving the ladies a way to pee that wasn’t even gross!
Ha, I dont know about that. Someone bought it, just a bucket and a toilet lid and since I was into biochar, I thought I could make this a little less disgusting.
I even trialled a bird cage with char as a substrate, worm farming, greywater reed bed, tank base, water treatment -drinking and dirty, potting medium, animal pen flooring, animal feed etc. I used to share all the experiments. Char is easy to make at home and it does have a 1001 uses while having the feel good of permanently locked carbon. One thing I haven’t done as I dont have one is use it as the replacement for “carbon” in a proper composting toilet system, I think it would be much better than sawdust.
I probably wouldn’t use it as a kitty litter tray as the dirty footprints after would be a bit disgusting but it would work.
If it’s “permanently locked carbon” then that would imply it’s not available for chemical reactions. And so I don’t see how it can be the browns in your compost. Doesn’t it have to be bioavailable to be composted? If it’s available for reactions, it isn’t permanently sequestered, right?
It’s not the browns for a compost, it’s an addition of 5-10%. Humanure usually goes out into another composting system for 12 months before use, the addition of biochar carbon during the pooping phase would be an experiment to see if it cuts smells (which is what the addition of small amounts of sawdust does). You’re not really creating a browns:greens compost ratio in a composting toilet, particularly with the small addition of sawdust each time you poop.
The char attracts ions and other charges, the structure holds microbes. It’s still doing stuff even though it’s mostly inert.
You can read a few articles here if you have account: https://medium.com/tag/biochar