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C&RT say don't empty your compost toilet in our bins.


Alan de Enfield

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2 hours ago, peterboat said:

My poo bin can last up to 3 months, the wee is done weekly added to the IBC at the allotment where its mixes with rainwater, we water the allotment with it as its a valuable resource same as the poo when its composted

I realise you are far from typical with the resources and will to do it properly Peter and all power to your elbow.

You are the 1 in 100 though and the other 99...

 

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3 hours ago, Slow and Steady said:

I realise you are far from typical with the resources and will to do it properly Peter and all power to your elbow.

You are the 1 in 100 though and the other 99...

 

 

 

Peterboat, however, is convinced everyone's circumstances are identical to his own. 

 

 

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4 hours ago, peterboat said:

Here's the blurb its been going for years 

Screenshot_20220519-202807_Chrome.jpg

"Gas fired burners..." So it does take in a basic fuel as well as the waste to be incinerated. Which raises the possibility that sometimes most or all of the energy produced by the steam turbine has actually come from the gas, rather than the waste.

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7 hours ago, David Mack said:

"Gas fired burners..." So it does take in a basic fuel as well as the waste to be incinerated. Which raises the possibility that sometimes most or all of the energy produced by the steam turbine has actually come from the gas, rather than the waste.

 

Especially as the blurb shown seems to avoid using efficiency and uses sufficiency instead. That must raise a question.

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13 hours ago, Arthur Marshall said:

Yes,  of course, but the infrastructure is there and is proven technology, and doesn't rely on a bloke in a truck lifting up a truly horrible lid filled with decomposing bags of nastiness.

Expecting someone else to deal with your dog's waste on a bulk basis seems to me to be dodging your personal responsibility for its characteristics and behaviour. And, as we all well know, dog owners are not generally given to behaving responsibly - every street I've lived in has suffered from noisy dogs and trees and fences are littered with poo bags. If the dog waste bin is full, they don't carry it to the next, they dump it on the path.

I realise it's always someone else's dog, never the responsible owner in front of one, but there are a hell of a lot of someone elses.

For the same reason, I'd expect composting loo owners (apart from Peterboat) to behave as badly. I'm just extrapolating from the evidence. 

The same could have been said about burning coal, why bother installing gas mains. We then realised we could do better, for our health and the good of the planet. 

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On 18/05/2022 at 10:08, David Mack said:

Yes, composting human waste is a good thing. But all that happens on a boat is that the waste is partially dried. How then do you get that material safely, cleanly and affordably stored and transported to a suitable composting facility?

 

Isn't there a bloke on a bike collecting it and composting it in London?

 

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1 hour ago, Jim Riley said:

The same could have been said about burning coal, why bother installing gas mains. We then realised we could do better, for our health and the good of the planet. 

And when, as now, people can't afford the gas or electric to heat their homes, and most don't have fires or stoves any more? So much for health, and I'm not sure how much good gas extraction did for the planet, nor, if it's such a good thing, why gas boilers are soon to be banned?

I've been lucky enough to have cut down two trees and have enough fuel for possibly three more winters. Sadly, no power company executive is going to get a bonus out of that and nobody's getting any dividends either.

My daughter, on the other hand, will just have to spend another winter wrapped in a duvet all day so she can have a bit of heat when the kids come back from school. We'd have been better planting forests for firewood and installing efficient stoves.

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On 18/05/2022 at 14:25, Bargebuilder said:

Councils make no fuss about providing numerous and widespread dog waste bins where raw excrement is deposited, so it can't be that difficult or expensive.

Be wary of "the Council" - there are two layers...

 

Local Authorities provide litter bins (which may also accept dog waste) at spots which are heavy on litter. Sometimes after applying pressure to the local McDonalds / Starbucks that actually it is their litter.

 

Town or Parish (or Village) Councils provide Dog Poo bins in isolated places. we have (at the last count) 72 for a parish of 12,000 people. We do it because it makes the area more pleasant - but if someone dumps four coke cans and a big Mac in our Poo Bin then Dog waste gets left laying around...

 

For reference each Poo Bin costs approx £150 to install and £2 a week to empty - this comes (if you live in our Parish) from your precept. As has been said before "you do the maths"

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5 minutes ago, Arthur Marshall said:

And when, as now, people can't afford the gas or electric to heat their homes, and most don't have fires or stoves any more? So much for health, and I'm not sure how much good gas extraction did for the planet, nor, if it's such a good thing, why gas boilers are soon to be banned?

I've been lucky enough to have cut down two trees and have enough fuel for possibly three more winters. Sadly, no power company executive is going to get a bonus out of that and nobody's getting any dividends either.

My daughter, on the other hand, will just have to spend another winter wrapped in a duvet all day so she can have a bit of heat when the kids come back from school. We'd have been better planting forests for firewood and installing efficient stoves.

all well and good, but we are talking principles here and I didnt consider your reason valid. We still need to act on climate change, can't bury our heads in the sand. 

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4 minutes ago, 1st ade said:

For reference each Poo Bin costs approx £150 to install and £2 a week to empty

Interesting...

Keeping in mind the fact that separating/dessicating toilets produce tiny volumes of solid waste that builds up very slowly over long periods of time, poo bins, whoever supplies and empties them, needn't be very large or  frequent along the canal to service those who enjoy the advantages of waterless toilets.

 

A previous poster suggested that disposal facilities should not be provided because only 2% of 20,000 boat owners use them. That's only 400 which I suspect is a gross underestimate, but if the numbers are that small, the amount of partially dry humanure needing to be disposed of every month would be incredibly small.

 

 

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44 minutes ago, Jim Riley said:

all well and good, but we are talking principles here and I didnt consider your reason valid. We still need to act on climate change, can't bury our heads in the sand. 

 

As the UK announce more drilling for oil & gas, and Germany says "stuff the targets" if we are not buying from Russia we are going back to coal.

 

The priorities are to live and survive the next Winter NOW !

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25 minutes ago, Bargebuilder said:

Interesting...

Keeping in mind the fact that separating/dessicating toilets produce tiny volumes of solid waste that builds up very slowly over long periods of time, poo bins, whoever supplies and empties them, needn't be very large or  frequent along the canal to service those who enjoy the advantages of waterless toilets.

 

A previous poster suggested that disposal facilities should not be provided because only 2% of 20,000 boat owners use them. That's only 400 which I suspect is a gross underestimate, but if the numbers are that small, the amount of partially dry humanure needing to be disposed of every month would be incredibly small.

 

 

IIRC the composting loo survey and information from suppliers showed there were something like 700 boats with composting toilets at the time, which is about 2% of boats, and that most of these (75%?) didn't compost their waste properly. The problem for CART is that so long as people were allowed to bag'n'bin their waste -- convenient and zero cost to them -- the numbers of composting toilet installs were increasing year by year, and then the waste disposal company (Biffa) kicked up a fuss too, so CART stopped allowing this.

 

The issue is not so much the amount of waste, it's that for CART to allow widespread use of composting toilets on boats again a disposal system needs to cover the entire canal network, this needs a lot of points, and the cost per collection only depends a bit on the amount -- the cost of running collections for the 500 or so bag'n'binners is not that much less than if 20000 boats used composting toilets, because it still needs a man in a van (or a fleet of vans) to drive around them all regularly.

 

The company who started offering collections in London is apparently finding it difficult to make a business of it, even charging fees similar to pumpouts -- probably because many of the users installed them because they were cheap to run and don't want to pay, so they either carry on disposing of the waste illegally or have replaced the toilets with cassettes.

 

As I said several times but you keep ignoring, composting toilets on boats would be great (and affordable) if lots of people used them (say, 10000 like use cassettes and pumpouts) and there was a system-wide network of collecting points.

 

But there aren't, so how do we get there? It's chicken and egg, until a lot of boaters use them the collection is too expensive or doesn't raise enough revenue to pay for the installation and emptying of the bins, but until these exist most boaters won't install them...

Edited by IanD
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On 18/05/2022 at 16:27, TheBiscuits said:

 

Yes I quite agree.

 

I was countering @haggis's thought that large scale sewage works were the traditional method. 

 

We were talking to an old chap up on the Lancaster Canal who remembers Savick Brook being an open sewer in the 1960's and couldn't understand why anyone would want to take a boat along it ...

 

And then there was that big  bloke who used to pee in it... 🤣

871438277_a61b674580_z.jpg

Edited by cuthound
Phat phingers
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31 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

IIRC the composting loo survey and information from suppliers showed there were something like 700 boats with composting toilets at the time, which is about 2% of boats, and that most of these (75%?) didn't compost their waste properly. The problem for CART is that so long as people were allowed to bag'n'bin their waste -- convenient and zero cost to them -- the numbers of composting toilet installs were increasing year by year, and then the waste disposal company (Biffa) kicked up a fuss too, so CART stopped allowing this.

 

The issue is not so much the amount of waste, it's that for CART to allow widespread use of composting toilets on boats again a disposal system needs to cover the entire canal network, this needs a lot of points, and the cost per collection only depends a bit on the amount -- the cost of running collections for the 500 or so bag'n'binners is not that much less than if 20000 boats used composting toilets, because it still needs a man in a van (or a fleet of vans) to drive around them all regularly.

 

The company who started offering collections in London is apparently finding it difficult to make a business of it, even charging fees similar to pumpouts -- probably because many of the users installed them because they were cheap to run and don't want to pay, so they either carry on disposing of the waste illegally or have replaced the toilets with cassettes.

 

As I said several times but you keep ignoring, composting toilets on boats would be great (and affordable) if lots of people used them (say, 10000 like use cassettes and pumpouts) and there was a system-wide network of collecting points.

 

But there aren't, so how do we get there? It's chicken and egg, until a lot of boaters use them the collection is too expensive or doesn't raise enough revenue to pay for the installation and emptying of the bins, but until these exist most boaters won't install them...

I did not think that CaRT had the power to ban them on boats - and they have not, as far as I can see, tried to do so. All that they have banned (and it was not so much CaRT as Biffa) is the disposal in general waste skips. Boaters, such as Peterboat, are free to continue with them so log as they have a compliant method of disposal.

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On 19/05/2022 at 09:15, Bargebuilder said:

They describe it as an 'energy recovery facility' not an energy consuming facility.

 

A separate division of the last company I worked for built and operated a waste incineration plant at Slough.

 

I was given a walk around it.

 

Basically the company charged the local authority slightly less than the land fill tax to incinerate their waste.

 

The heat was used to make steam, which drove a generator and the electricity produced was sold to the grid. They also recovered small amounts of metal and sold that. They tried to arrange a local district heating scheme but the property developers were not interested.

 

However it was only the high landfill tax that made the plant viable and eventually it closed down because rising energy costs made it commercially unviable.

Edited by cuthound
Clarification
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15 minutes ago, Mike Todd said:

I did not think that CaRT had the power to ban them on boats - and they have not, as far as I can see, tried to do so. All that they have banned (and it was not so much CaRT as Biffa) is the disposal in general waste skips. Boaters, such as Peterboat, are free to continue with them so log as they have a compliant method of disposal.

I agree, and in this long thread it was suggested that the only way C&RT could achieve that was for the BSS to ban them on environmental grounds (tipping the 'stuff' in the cut), So - dry toilet fitted - BSS fail.

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41 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

A support division of the last company I worked for built and operated a waste incineration plant at Slough.

 

I was given a walk around it.

 

Basically the company charged the local authority slightly less than the land fill tax to incinerate their waste.

 

The heat was used to make steam, which drove a generator and the electricity produced was sold to the grid. They also recovered small amounts of metal and sold that.

 

However it was only the high landfill tax that made the plant viable and eventually it closed down because rising energy costs made it commercially unviable.

There is still a small power station in slough but I think they burn wood products rather than waste.  

https://www.ssethermal.com/energy-from-waste/slough-multifuel/

 

Probably the same place and apparently they are going to do a JV and start doing waste burning for power again. 

 

Edited by magnetman
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2 minutes ago, magnetman said:

There is still a small power station in slough but I think they burn wood products rather than waste.  

https://www.ssethermal.com/energy-from-waste/slough-multifuel/

 

Probably the same place and apparently they are going to do a JV and start doing waste burning for power again. 

 

 

I think there was already one originally run by the local authority, but they sold it off and the company I worked for built another.

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59 minutes ago, Mike Todd said:

I did not think that CaRT had the power to ban them on boats - and they have not, as far as I can see, tried to do so. All that they have banned (and it was not so much CaRT as Biffa) is the disposal in general waste skips. Boaters, such as Peterboat, are free to continue with them so log as they have a compliant method of disposal.

 

That's correct, it's bag'n'binning that has been banned. But for the majority of composting toilet boaters that might as well be a ban, because they haven't got a legit way of disposing of the waste any more.

 

Peter is an exception, being one of the minority (25% IIRC) who do use them properly -- and should be allowed to continue doing so 🙂

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It's worth remembering that part of this discussion led from a district council stating that all of its dog/street bin waste went to energy recovery and it was encouraging people to use these receptacles for raw dog poo, which is much less pleasant and much less easy to incinerate than partially dessicated human waste.

 

The implication was that most local authorities were moving in the same direction.

 

They also approved of using ones household non-recyclable waste bin for the same purpose.

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1 hour ago, cuthound said:

 

I think there was already one originally run by the local authority, but they sold it off and the company I worked for built another.

 

I think the original Slough power station was built and operated by Slough Estates as part of its trading estate infrastructure. I don't know if it was ever transferred to Slough Borough Council but it seems SSE probably operate it now.

 

It used to supply some houses as well and the resident suffered far less power cuts than those with the local electricity board (Souther Electricity I think).

Edited by Tony Brooks
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1 hour ago, Bargebuilder said:

It's worth remembering that part of this discussion led from a district council stating that all of its dog/street bin waste went to energy recovery and it was encouraging people to use these receptacles for raw dog poo, which is much less pleasant and much less easy to incinerate than partially dessicated human waste.

 

The implication was that most local authorities were moving in the same direction.

 

They also approved of using ones household non-recyclable waste bin for the same purpose.

 

There's an essential difference here; dogs don't (and can't) use human toilets, so unless we exterminate them all they have to crap somewhere, and their poo has to be disposed of somehow.

 

Humans -- notably those on boats -- can use toilets which one way or another (mains sewage, septic tanks, pump-outs. cassettes...) convey their poo to sewage treatment plants, where it is processed. Multiple methods and networks already exist to make this possible, and this is the generally accepted method for dealing with human waste.

 

It would be sensible if dog poo was treated the same way, and the obvious method would be for people to pick it up, bag it, take it home, and empty the bag down their own toilet -- but for some reason dog owners don't do this... 😞

 

And adding more human poo -- semi-digested/composted or not -- to the dog poo going to incinerators/landfill seem to be going in entirely the wrong direction to me. Just because dogs do something isn't a good reason to use this as to justify humans -- who generate a *lot* more poo -- to do the same, otherwise to avoid paying to use a public toilet people would just crap on the pavement... 😉

 

Composting toilets used as intended -- local composting of the waste and subsequent use by the owner -- are great, you can't get much more eco-friendly. As soon as you have to collect the waste centrally and then transport it somewhere else to be "processed" -- which often seems to mean burning it or burying it in landfill -- they makes no sense ecologically or economically when you look at the big picture.

 

Though they may still be nice for the owner, who gets all the convenience (geddit?) but outsources the problems and costs of dealing with the result...

Edited by IanD
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Bagging dog shit was originally invented by dogs as a way of ensuring that their DNA is protected in the event of a silly end-of-world scenario which would probably be caused by humans. Dogs are clever. They realise that some humans would survive and they would probably have the technology available and seek ways to recreate canine companions. 

 

It's entirely probable that this can be done from waste products. 

 

Preservation is key here. 

 

 

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