Bargebuilder

What do you predict they'll do when the ban on separating toilets doesn't work.

But sea toilets aren't banned, the use of them in many places is however. All a BSS inspector can do is to insist on a sea cock that is capable of isolating the toilet, nothing else. In practice no BSS inspector has ever even asked to have a look and wouldn't even know if we had a sea toilet or a composter or another option.

Even if a sanction were to be legal and possible, how would anyone know what was in the rubbish sack that was being put in a bin. Not even CCTV would help. Even if it were legal for the C&RT to force entry onto a boat, it would be easy to keep an Elsan on board to make it look as if the rules were being adhered to. It wouldn't be fair to those who compost their 'toilet' ashore to ban these loos completely.

I think you missed my point. How many, particularly continuous cruisers, who have ripped out whatever system they had in favour of a separating loo which is odour free, cost free to empty and a lot more pleasant than Elsans or pump-outs will change back? Much more likely that many will ignore the ban causing problems for the C&RT.

The C&RT certainly encouraged the proliferation of separating loos, simply by making it easy and cheap. To say that owners of these loos have to find an alternative could be described as naïve. But you had a tractor, I've only got a shovel!

Made in haste and regretted I'm sure, but having done so, they are risking fines from their waste carrier and pollution of their property if they don't soon identify an alternative.

Materials to be composted can heat up quite dramatically and quickly, even in small containers. Perhaps not enough to sterilise completely, but enough for the roses, if not for the runner beans. At home we have a huge compost heap, some 7 metres long by 1.2m X 1.2m: it takes me some hours of backbreaking work to turn it. My brother brings round a quarter full bin bag full of contributions to the heap occasionally an although this can only amount to 20 or so litres, very often it's steaming when he tips it out, so a 20l bucket of material on a boat should 'cook' and compost very nicely, but take a bit longer to finish. My compost heap in the garden reaches 60 centigrade in the middle, enough to scald your hand should you be foolish enough to plunge it in.

Firstly, let's admit that very few people even try to compost to completion, but there is no doubt that it's possible. There is a food source, the toilet waste and the sawdust plus kitchen waste too if you want to do it properly, moisture, oxygen and warmth. It needs to be mixed once a week at a minimum to prevent anaerobic decomposition which would produce the slime and smell that has been mentioned. The breakdown starts immediately, but really takes off when the bucket starts to fill as that's when things really and literally hot up. The containers in many proprietary so called composting loos are a bit small and so although some composting does happen, it's very little and further storage/mixing is required in bigger buckets over many months to get near a product that is a sweet smelling and crumbly soil additive. That's why, when the C&RT made its rash offer to take toilet waste, people not surprisingly jumped at it.

The situation may well be worse than that, but the C&RT are at least in part to blame. I'll bet there are lots of boaters who only made the change to separating loos because the C&RT offered a free and simple solution about what to do with the dessicated contents of their toilets.

Correct, the first step is dessication of the 'new deposit', then, once a little less sloppy and mixed with sawdust, composting really can't be stopped.

How refreshing to have a genuine question from someone who wants to understand. Composting requires moisture to occur, but somewhat less than there is in a 'fresh deposit', but the fan that creates a negative pressure within the toilet, creates air movement that aids evaporation and then removes it from the container. This negative pressure holds the answer to your second question, where does the gas or smell go. The fan that sucks the smell from the loo passes it through an activated charcoal filter if the outlet is remain inside the boat, or it can be vented to the outside where any smell quickly dissipates.

Composting is a process, not an end result. Given a mix of organic matter, moisture, warmth and air, it's almost impossible to stop it from composting. Of course composting toilets don't produce finished compost, but show me any manufacturer that says their product can. That doesn't mean that the process of composting doesn't start in the toilet, so the toilet is 'composting', but not to anything like completion. It is possible to build your own separating toilet for not much more than £100, the bit that does the actual separating being available for less than £50. Home built loos can have a much bigger receptacle, 20l or more, that not only lasts for many, many weeks, but the increased volume of material also makes the composting process more successful and complete.

I use both terms regularly, slipping seamlessly between them. To be fair to the C&RT, in their publication to 'separating' toilet owners, they did refer to the product as partly composted and a number of people on this forum seem to be able to manage at least that level of decomposition. Of course, they will be in the minority since the C&RT effectively encouraged 'separating' toilet owners to not bother even trying to store and compost.

I am actually in full agreement with you, that the C&RT encouraged to proliferation of composting toilets by their releases to press. With great care!

When the C&RT instructed the users of composting toilets to place their contents into their bins, they couldn't have imagined how quickly this practice would have become popular with the resultant huge increase in the numbers of boaters who have converted and who I would guess would never go back.

Surely they will: the change may even have been a result of Biffa refusing to offer a solution to the problem of slightly composted toilet waste.