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

[tree monkey]

6 minutes ago, WillCful said:

 

 

The idea that we can just carry on as we do now merrily flushing away is daft. Wouldn’t it be cool if boaters could lead the compost revolution! ? 

I am curious what the issus is in general terms with our current sewer system, I'm not talking about boaters here more the general urban system. 

Generally the system works, it takes thousands (millions?)of tons of human waste and converts it into clean water and a by product that is used more and more as a soil improver, digested to produce methane and so on

The system is not without fault and these should be addressed but how can multiple small scale urban composting work?

1 hour ago, Chagall said:

I think the idea was more for the canal users initially, but more councils will eventually look at sewer-less buildings, some countries  already are. 

Where?

I imagine it would be easier to put into place a water less system in a newly developed location than a country with an existing system 

[IanD]

2 minutes ago, Bod said:

C&RT are in a tough spot.

Their contract with the waste disposal company, does not allow for the removal of a certian waste product, at the contract price.

What should they do?

Pay more for a contract that will allow removal.  (we pay more licence fees)

Change contractors.  (for the same cost?)

Remove the waste product from the collection.

 

Bod

Answers on a postcard  please.

 

It's not just a case of paying more or changing contractors; if bag-and-bin poo contaminates the bin and changes the waste category from normal to hazardous (or whatever) which means it can't be sorted/recycled but has to be incinerated/landfilled, it's very "non-green", which is increasingly important to everyone nowadays including CaRT.

 

Removing it from the collection once it's in there is a non-starter for obvious reasons, which means the only solution is to stop it getting in there in the first place.

 

Which means either separate collection (the "compost network" idea), or stopping it being generated in the first place (banning composting toilets on boats).

 

Anyone see any other possibilities?

[Chagall]

6 minutes ago, tree monkey said:

I am curious what the issus is in general terms with our current sewer system, I'm not talking about boaters here more the general urban system. 

Generally the system works, it takes thousands (millions?)of tons of human waste and converts it into clean water and a by product that is used more and more as a soil improver, digested to produce methane and so on

The system is not without fault and these should be addressed but how can multiple small scale urban composting work?

Where?

I imagine it would be easier to put into place a water less system in a newly developed location than a country with an existing system 

https://greywateraction.org/composting-toilets/ The last two paragraphs.

[tree monkey]

6 minutes ago, Chagall said:

https://greywateraction.org/composting-toilets/ The last two paragraphs.

Interesting thank you

[Alan de Enfield]

4 minutes ago, IanD said:

Anyone see any other possibilities?

 

If the population had any social responsibility then the obvious answer would be to have an additional bin in ever bin-compound across the whole system, in it own right this may not be prohibitively expensive, BUT, it would require a seperate collection lorry (and driver) which would double the cost of emptying the bins in every compound.

There may well be (definitely will be ?) be an oncost for treatment of the bagged poop. The bags will have to be opened (unless they are compostable bags) and the contents be tipped onto a compost heap run by the waste carrier, or a subcontractor.

 

Unfortunately (as previously suggested) the bin would be filled with non-compostable stuff.

Compostable stuff would be put into the wrong bin

One non-compostable bag will ruin the system

Costs.

 

 

We have a 55 person 'sewage treatment plant.' for the caravan park,  and since the spreading of raw sewage on agricultural land was made unlawful a few years ago, we now have to pay an 'excess' on the collection charge. This excess covers the additional transport costs as only a few bigger sewage works can handle tanker loads (non of the local ones), and, the sewage works charge a 'treatment fee' for evey tanker load.

 

Boaters, and council tax / water rates payers, do not easily see the cost of sewage disposal. It is expensive.

[David Mack]

2 hours ago, Chagall said:

but more councils will eventually look at sewer-less buildings, some countries  already are. 

In buildings the foul water discharge is not just from toilets. It also includes all water from baths, showers, sinks, basins, washing machines etc.  For any new development (in the UK) it will be a condition of planning consent that proper arrangements for the disposal of foul water are made. In most cases that will mean connection to the sewer network. Only for more remote properties will discharge to septic tank or a small scale treatment system be permitted. And discharge must be to a soakaway, not a watercourse. Even if a remote property has a compost toilet, it is still likely to require some additional specific treatment for grey water (and urine).

[Alan de Enfield]

49 minutes ago, David Mack said:

And discharge must be to a soakaway, not a watercourse.

 

 

That may have changed.

We used to have to pay the EA for an annual 'less than 5 cu metres per day discharge licence' for our sewage treatment plant. (all grey water from washing, showers etc etc along with the  sewage plant output) From memory it was a nominal sum (£5 rings a bell) and a few years ago the EA decided that they would no longer issue the licence and we could discharge directly into a waterway (Dyke). Water quality would continue to be monitored downstream and if we did "something naughty" and dicharged (say) raw sewage we'd be in big trouble,

 

Surface water from the  buildings roof, car park, patio, road ways etc was/is discharged directly into the dyke

[WillCful]

2 hours ago, IanD said:

Which means either separate collection (the "compost network" idea), or stopping it being generated in the first place (banning composting toilets on boats).

Compost-enabled Network

 

come on Ian, it’s going to catch on! 

[MartinW]

12 hours ago, Bod said:

That's the best Civil Serviersh, I've seen for a long time.

Were you a script writer for "Yes Minister"?

 

Bod

haha Made my day. You might think so, I couldn't possibly comment.

 

[rasputin]

You don't have to get far into the Foxes latest video to find out what consistency the waste is that they are putting in the bins

[IanD]

I thought I'd try and come up with some actual numbers to estimate the cost of a "compost-enabled network" -- a bit long but you need to go into all the bits and bobs to make everything add up...

 

They're all guesswork, if you have better numbers then feel free to use them, but the overall conclusions are unlikely to change ?

 

The problem with composting is that people don't value the time and effort it takes to do it, if they do it themselves because they want to be green or have a non-smelly toilet it's just part of their life -- but if somebody else has to do it for them, they have to be paid.

 

Let's work from the bottom up (ho, ho). Say you spend half an hour per week on average dealing with your poo and the compost, that's 26 hours per year, which is 3 working days (all numbers are rounded off because they're only approximate anyway). Someone employed to do this for you can therefore deal with about 70 boats with composting toilets. Since there are currently about 200 bag-and-chuckers, the canal system will need 3 compost wranglers.

 

Now from the top down. The only way to make something like this work would be to join a "poo club", where you get a key to open locked composting boxes placed around the canals -- this stops non club members from misusing them, and ought to mean members take care of them and use them properly because it's a facility that they're paying for. These boxes have to be emptied and then the compost has to be tended and processed, and three people to do this sounds about right -- one for the North, one for the Midlands, one for the South.

 

Good, both methods come up with the same result. How much might this all cost?

 

The cost of each poo-wrangler will be an absolute minimum of £50k per year including employment overheads, van and fuel costs to collect to poo and so on, so that's £150k per year to run the network -- which shared between 200 boats is £750 a year each, or £15 a week each. It would have to be a flat fee because there's no easy way of knowing how much poo each boat puts in the bin. On top of this there's the cost of setting up the network (bins, equipment, admin, van leasing) which for most businesses is typically between 1-2 years of running costs -- let's assume 18 months, which is £225k or just over £1000 per boat.

 

To join the poo club you'd probably have to take out a contract like with broadband (also typically over 18 months) to lock you in to using it and guarantee it brings in some money; if the number of boats stays the same this would mean you'd pay a total of £30 a week for the first 18 month contract (or pay about £1000 up-front to join), then £15 a week thereafter. And this assumes the service is run "not-for-profit", any entrepreneur would want to make some -- though I can't imagine one showing the slightest interest in something that employs 3 people and turns over £150k per year...

 

You'd need to make your way to a poostation every couple of weeks to offload just like having to go for a pumpout, so there's no advantage from this, plus you have to do all the separating out and storage on board the boat. A pumpout costs around £5 per week (assuming £15 every 3 weeks). So a bit less convenient and a lot more expensive than a pumpout, at least 3x more even ignoring setup costs. The cost difference to cassettes doesn't bear thinking about ?

 

But at least it's green, isn't it? Well no, with 3 vans driving round the country to collect the compost it could well be less green than conventional sewage systems like pumpout or Elsan (but it could be green with much bigger volumes).

 

So anyone who's installed a composting toilet to save money would run a mile if they have to pay the real costs of bag-and-binning. As would anyone doing it for green reasons, if they looked at the overall CO2 burden including the network, transport and disposal.

 

What happens if more boats install them and the cost goes down? Well even if we hope this will happen somehow ignoring the facts above (that with a small number of boats it's ridiculously expensive and not even green, so how do we get past this?) the cost per boat does drop; a good rule or thumb is that it falls with the square root of volume, for example doubling the number of users doesn't keep the cost unchanged but it also doesn't double it. We could guesstimate that for the cost to fall to the same as pumpouts a couple of thousand boats would voluntarily need to join the poo club, at which point new builds would definitely switch -- however to get people to swap out existing systems the cost needs to be lower, so this might push the number up to 5000 boats or so.

 

But if we leave all this to "the market" (not forcing the switch to happen via regulations) this will never happen, the cost to the boater will never even reach the break-even point because there's no way 2000 boaters will install composting loos that are more expensive and less convenient than pumpouts (and much more expensive than Elsans) and which aren't even green.

 

Which means the only way to make this work is for CaRT to invest in the startup costs, and either subsidise running costs for the first few years until a large number of boats (maybe 5000 or so) have switched, or encourage people to switch with something like a license discount, or force people to switch by changing the rules and banning/penalising pumpouts and cassettes. The last one would cause uproar, a license discount would lead to protests from non-switchers about subsidising tree-huggers, and a subsidy is the same thing dressed up differently -- and initially at least means CaRT spending a chunk of money to subsidise a few hundred bag-and-bin boaters (why should they?).

 

So the only way that this could happen would be if CaRT made it a central plank of their "green canals" strategy and justified it that way -- that such a change is good and will have to happen, and needs an upfront investment/subsidy to help protect the environment in future. This is very similar to the case for electric boats and charging points; it's obviously the right thing in the long run, the problem is how to get there past the "chicken-and-egg" too-expensive-not-enough-users problem, plus the cost of switching for people who already have a working solution.

 

Maybe CaRT will do this, like they might address the charging point issue -- but it's always difficult to do the right thing for the long term when it's more expensive in the short term, you're cash-strapped, and somebody else holds the purse-strings... ?

 

[which probably means they'll have no choice except to ban their use in the short-term, maybe with exceptions for the likes of Peter -- but this opens the door to fiddling the system...]

 

Obviously none of this applies to people like Peter who use composting toilets as intended and do the composting properly themselves; for them it's clean, green, cheap, and they're happy ?

Edited February 17, 2021 by IanD

[GUMPY]

Maybe @peterboatcould volunteer to have all the local compost toilets dumped his compost heaps. That way he would be able to sell compost after a year or so, a nice little sideline.

[David Mack]

A number of the newer large marinas around the system have extensive landscaped grounds around the moorings (usually the heaps of soil removed from the mooring basin). These have the space to locate a composting operation, and those that have more elaborate planting than just plain grass have a use for compost. They also have a large local customer base as well as potential passing trade. They already offer elsan and pumpout disposal, so it could be quite strainghtforward to add a dry toilet emptying service. No need to transport the waste offsite. The workload for a small operation is not that significant, so can probably be accommodated within the existing staffing at small additional cost, and the service would be charged for.

So which marina is going to be first to demonstrate its green credentials by offering such a service?

[IanD]

17 minutes ago, David Mack said:

A number of the newer large marinas around the system have extensive landscaped grounds around the moorings (usually the heaps of soil removed from the mooring basin). These have the space to locate a composting operation, and those that have more elaborate planting than just plain grass have a use for compost. They also have a large local customer base as well as potential passing trade. They already offer elsan and pumpout disposal, so it could be quite strainghtforward to add a dry toilet emptying service. No need to transport the waste offsite. The workload for a small operation is not that significant, so can probably be accommodated within the existing staffing at small additional cost, and the service would be charged for.

So which marina is going to be first to demonstrate its green credentials by offering such a service?

That would all work very well, for boats in the marina with composting toilets, or visitors. But to solve the problem under discussion, the question is -- where are the bag'n'binners moored?

 

Given that saving money seems to be one big driving force behind the rise in numbers, I suspect that very few of them are moored in expensive marinas, they're much more likely to be mostly CCers or CMers out on the canal network. If they could visit the "green marinas" this would solve many of the problems I described -- but only if there were a large number of "green marinas", meaning most of them (and they're often a long way apart). Back to chicken-and-egg again... ?

 

The problem with any new service system (like BEV charging) is that it doesn't really work properly until it's widely available -- imagine trying to persuade people to install pump-out toilets if there were only a few pumpout stations widely scattered around the system...

 

[yes I know pumpout stations were largely introduced by hire boatyards who could use them on every boat once a week, but I doubt they want to install composting toilets today which rely on boaters using them properly]

Edited February 17, 2021 by IanD

[TheBiscuits]

40 minutes ago, IanD said:

Since there are currently about 200 bag-and-chuckers, the canal system will need 3 compost wranglers.

 

Where are you getting this figure from Ian?  You keep saying <1% of boats or in this case 200.

 

 

 

I suspect you made it up ...

[IanD]

13 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

Where are you getting this figure from Ian?  You keep saying <1% of boats or in this case 200.

 

 

Earlier in the thread somebody (Dr. Bob, page 4) said that out of 250 composting toilet boaters, only 70 correctly composted their compost, leaving 180 b'n'b-ers. Given that these toilets are still pretty uncommon I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers are correct, equally they could be wrong (too low) which would change the numbers.

 

If you have other more accurate numbers, feel free to supply them.

 

I suspect it won't change the fact that if people had to pay the real cost of disposing of their non-compost, it would cost considerably more than pumpouts and a *lot* more than cassettes, and be much less green than they think.

 

This is a classic case of externalising costs, just like polluting industries -- making something look cheap by ignoring what it actually costs somebody else to clear up your mess.

 

I'm all in favour of composting toilets used properly, unfortunately only a quarter of owners do this today ?

Edited February 17, 2021 by IanD

[peterboat]

33 minutes ago, Loddon said:

Maybe @peterboatcould volunteer to have all the local compost toilets dumped his compost heaps. That way he would be able to sell compost after a year or so, a nice little sideline.

I would need a bigger allotment! We have 3 on our moorings and they sort out their arrangements for disposal (allotment) so it works out ok I am sure others do the same?

[IanD]

10 minutes ago, peterboat said:

I would need a bigger allotment! We have 3 on our moorings and they sort out their arrangements for disposal (allotment) so it works out ok I am sure others do the same?

You and your friends aren't the problem, the 75% who don't compost properly (see above) are ?

 

I hope you don't get caught out by CaRT changing the rules to stop them, but I suspect you might be...

Edited February 17, 2021 by IanD

[peterboat]

6 minutes ago, IanD said:

You and your friends aren't the problem, the 75% who don't compost are ?

In truth Ian we have no idea how many compost or use bins really  all the ones I know with composting loos are the good guys, what annoys me is cassette users that dump in hedge bottoms! Stinks and kills things

[David Mack]

26 minutes ago, IanD said:

That would all work very well, for boats in the marina with composting toilets, or visitors. But to solve the problem under discussion, the question is -- where are the bag'n'binners moored?

 

Given that saving money seems to be one big driving force behind the rise in numbers, I suspect that very few of them are moored in expensive marinas, they're much more likely to be mostly CCers or CMers out on the canal network. If they could visit the "green marinas" this would solve many of the problems I described -- but only if there were a large number of "green marinas", meaning most of them (and they're often a long way apart). Back to chicken-and-egg again... ?

 

The problem with any new service system (like BEV charging) is that it doesn't really work properly until it's widely available -- imagine trying to persuade people to install pump-out toilets if there were only a few pumpout stations widely scattered around the system...

 

[yes I know pumpout stations were largely introduced by hire boatyards who could use them on every boat once a week, but I doubt they want to install composting toilets today which rely on boaters using them properly]

Agreed a few 'green marinas' doesn't solve the whole problem. But it might kickstart something. Clearly there is some demand for compost toilets amongst marina users as otherwise BWML (or whatever they are called now) wouldn't have needed to ban them. Any marina offereing the service would become a more attractive location for boaters with a compost toilet to moor, which in turn could improve the economics of the operation for the marina.

[IanD]

5 minutes ago, peterboat said:

In truth Ian we have no idea how many compost or use bins really  all the ones I know with composting loos are the good guys, what annoys me is cassette users that dump in hedge bottoms! Stinks and kills things

According to Dr. Bob the numbers came from a Facebook survey of boaters in a group about composting toilets, they look big enough to be a reliable sample of who does and who doesn't.

 

No different to any poll or survey, you can't ask everyone, but you ask enough to get a reasonably reliable result. The actual proportion if you asked everybody could be 20% or 30% not 25%, but that doesn't change much.

 

I've also no idea what proportion of owners answered the survey; in some groups like this a large proportion of owners are members, in others it's much smaller, so I've no idea if the total number of composting toilets is a bit or a lot higher than this -- does anybody know?

 

2 minutes ago, David Mack said:

Agreed a few 'green marinas' doesn't solve the whole problem. But it might kickstart something. Clearly there is some demand for compost toilets amongst marina users as otherwise BWML (or whatever they are called now) wouldn't have needed to ban them. Any marina offereing the service would become a more attractive location for boaters with a compost toilet to moor, which in turn could improve the economics of the operation for the marina.

Indeed it would -- but it still wouldn't solve CaRTs b'n'b problem... ?

Edited February 17, 2021 by IanD

[TheBiscuits]

1 minute ago, IanD said:

According to Dr. Bob the numbers came from a Facebook survey

 

You have decided that the number of members of one facebook group gives the total number of installed waterless toilets on boats.  

 

That explains a lot.

[Chagall]

1 hour ago, IanD said:

I thought I'd try and come up with some actual numbers to estimate the cost of a "compost-enabled network" -- a bit long but you need to go into all the bits and bobs to make everything add up...

 

They're all guesswork, if you have better numbers then feel free to use them, but the overall conclusions are unlikely to change ?

 

The problem with composting is that people don't value the time and effort it takes to do it, if they do it themselves because they want to be green or have a non-smelly toilet it's just part of their life -- but if somebody else has to do it for them, they have to be paid.

 

Let's work from the bottom up (ho, ho). Say you spend half an hour per week on average dealing with your poo and the compost, that's 26 hours per year, which is 3 working days (all numbers are rounded off because they're only approximate anyway). Someone employed to do this for you can therefore deal with about 70 boats with composting toilets. Since there are currently about 200 bag-and-chuckers, the canal system will need 3 compost wranglers.

 

Now from the top down. The only way to make something like this work would be to join a "poo club", where you get a key to open locked composting boxes placed around the canals -- this stops non club members from misusing them, and ought to mean members take care of them and use them properly because it's a facility that they're paying for. These boxes have to be emptied and then the compost has to be tended and processed, and three people to do this sounds about right -- one for the North, one for the Midlands, one for the South.

 

Good, both methods come up with the same result. How much might this all cost?

 

The cost of each poo-wrangler will be an absolute minimum of £50k per year including employment overheads, van and fuel costs to collect to poo and so on, so that's £150k per year to run the network -- which shared between 200 boats is £750 a year each, or £15 a week each. It would have to be a flat fee because there's no easy way of knowing how much poo each boat puts in the bin. On top of this there's the cost of setting up the network (bins, equipment, admin, van leasing) which for most businesses is typically between 1-2 years of running costs -- let's assume 18 months, which is £225k or just over £1000 per boat.

 

To join the poo club you'd probably have to take out a contract like with broadband (also typically over 18 months) to lock you in to using it and guarantee it brings in some money; if the number of boats stays the same this would mean you'd pay a total of £30 a week for the first 18 month contract (or pay about £1000 up-front to join), then £15 a week thereafter. And this assumes the service is run "not-for-profit", any entrepreneur would want to make some -- though I can't imagine one showing the slightest interest in something that employs 3 people and turns over £150k per year...

 

You'd need to make your way to a poostation every couple of weeks to offload just like having to go for a pumpout, so there's no advantage from this, plus you have to do all the separating out and storage on board the boat. A pumpout costs around £5 per week (assuming £15 every 3 weeks). So a bit less convenient and a lot more expensive than a pumpout, at least 3x more even ignoring setup costs. The cost difference to cassettes doesn't bear thinking about ?

 

But at least it's green, isn't it? Well no, with 3 vans driving round the country to collect the compost it could well be less green than conventional sewage systems like pumpout or Elsan (but it could be green with much bigger volumes).

 

So anyone who's installed a composting toilet to save money would run a mile if they have to pay the real costs of bag-and-binning. As would anyone doing it for green reasons, if they looked at the overall CO2 burden including the network, transport and disposal.

 

What happens if more boats install them and the cost goes down? Well even if we hope this will happen somehow ignoring the facts above (that with a small number of boats it's ridiculously expensive and not even green, so how do we get past this?) the cost per boat does drop; a good rule or thumb is that it falls with the square root of volume, for example doubling the number of users doesn't keep the cost unchanged but it also doesn't double it. We could guesstimate that for the cost to fall to the same as pumpouts a couple of thousand boats would voluntarily need to join the poo club, at which point new builds would definitely switch -- however to get people to swap out existing systems the cost needs to be lower, so this might push the number up to 5000 boats or so.

 

But if we leave all this to "the market" (not forcing the switch to happen via regulations) this will never happen, the cost to the boater will never even reach the break-even point because there's no way 2000 boaters will install composting loos that are more expensive and less convenient than pumpouts (and much more expensive than Elsans) and which aren't even green.

 

Which means the only way to make this work is for CaRT to invest in the startup costs, and either subsidise running costs for the first few years until a large number of boats (maybe 5000 or so) have switched, or encourage people to switch with something like a license discount, or force people to switch by changing the rules and banning/penalising pumpouts and cassettes. The last one would cause uproar, a license discount would lead to protests from non-switchers about subsidising tree-huggers, and a subsidy is the same thing dressed up differently -- and initially at least means CaRT spending a chunk of money to subsidise a few hundred bag-and-bin boaters (why should they?).

 

So the only way that this could happen would be if CaRT made it a central plank of their "green canals" strategy and justified it that way -- that such a change is good and will have to happen, and needs an upfront investment/subsidy to help protect the environment in future. This is very similar to the case for electric boats and charging points; it's obviously the right thing in the long run, the problem is how to get there past the "chicken-and-egg" too-expensive-not-enough-users problem, plus the cost of switching for people who already have a working solution.

 

Maybe CaRT will do this, like they might address the charging point issue -- but it's always difficult to do the right thing for the long term when it's more expensive in the short term, you're cash-strapped, and somebody else holds the purse-strings... ?

 

[which probably means they'll have no choice except to ban their use in the short-term, maybe with exceptions for the likes of Peter -- but this opens the door to fiddling the system...]

 

Obviously none of this applies to people like Peter who use composting toilets as intended and do the composting properly themselves; for them it's clean, green, cheap, and they're happy ?

 

I appreciate the time and effort for that. Thank you.  ?

 

edit for the removal of doubt: ... it wasn't meant to seem patronising. 

 

 

Edited February 17, 2021 by Chagall
overthinking!

[IanD]

2 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

You have decided that the number of members of one facebook group gives the total number of installed waterless toilets on boats.  

 

That explains a lot.

I haven't "decided" anything -- I said where the numbers came from, and asked if anyone had any better ones. Do you?

 

To get the real cost including disposal down to less than pumpouts there would have to be a much larger number -- and as I said, I just put out a set of numbers, if they're wrong then I'll happily correct them.

Edited February 17, 2021 by IanD

[Alan de Enfield]

55 minutes ago, Loddon said:

Maybe @peterboatcould volunteer to have all the local compost toilets dumped his compost heaps. That way he would be able to sell compost after a year or so, a nice little sideline.

 

 

He would then need to become either a licenced 'waste dealer' or a 'waste broker'

 

• waste dealer – any person, business or organisation that buys waste with the aim of subsequently selling it, including in circumstances where the dealer does not take physical possession of the waste

• waste broker – any person, business or organisation that arranges waste transportation and management of waste on behalf of another party, such as organisations contracting out waste collection services e.g. local authorities, supermarkets and producer responsibility compliance schemes • waste manager – any person involved in the collection, transport, recovery or disposal of controlled waste, including the supervision of these operations, the aftercare of disposal sites and actions taken as a dealer or broker A separate duty of care applies to householders (occupiers of a domestic property), limited to taking all reasonable measures available to them to ensure their waste is only transferred to an authorised person. For the purposes of this Code, occupiers of domestic property are not treated as a ‘waste holder’ as defined above, when dealing with household waste produced on that property.

 

And subject to all of the same "Duty of Care" restrictions as Biffa etc.