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Composting toilet waste disposal in CaRT bins


IanD

Composting toilet waste disposal in CaRT bins  

88 members have voted

  1. 1. Should CaRT continue to allow non-composted human waste from composting toilets to be disposed of in their waste bins (previous CaRT policy) or ban it (updated CaRT policy)?

    • Yes, they should continue to allow this in future
      16
    • No, this should be prohibited in future
      57
    • I don't care
      15


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19 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

It certainly seems so.

 

More concerningly, it now seems that those raising their disgust at this have brought the issue of dog poo to Biffa's door, who are now looking at their obligations with regard to that. 

 

Be careful what you wish for, you may get more than you bargained.

 

I don't have a dog or any children (or a compost loo) so it makes no odds to me.

 

On a purely personal level, I'd prefer no dog poo in bins (or hanging from trees), but I realise that trying to find workable solutions is preferable to just banning things.

I have been trying to get sensible discussion on alternatives but few if any who use dry toilets are prepared to get involved.  The only sensible route I can see is commercial composting but whoever tried it would need a lot of facts and figures which dry toilet owners seem reluctant to put in the public domain.

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3 hours ago, frahkn said:

Leaving aside the impracticality, which to be fair you do mention, a ban would be unfair to me (and others like me) as I take my 'product' home. 

Same here mate mine is valuable fertiliser in the future, don't want to waste it by throwing it in a bin!

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51 minutes ago, doratheexplorer said:

It certainly seems so.

 

More concerningly, it now seems that those raising their disgust at this have brought the issue of dog poo to Biffa's door, who are now looking at their obligations with regard to that. 

 

Be careful what you wish for, you may get more than you bargained.

 

I don't have a dog or any children (or a compost loo) so it makes no odds to me.

 

On a purely personal level, I'd prefer no dog poo in bins (or hanging from trees), but I realise that trying to find workable solutions is preferable to just banning things.

 

I agree with you completely 100%, banning things is a bad idea; in the subject of this thread, innocent people (the "good composters") will be badly affected if the toilets are banned, which is not fair to them. But it may be where we end up, unless the bag'n'binners do what CaRT has asked them to. It would also be very unfair on dog-owning boaters if they were banned from binning it (e.g. by marinas) but landlubbers weren't.

 

Dog poo is a problem for the whole of society to solve, not just boaters. If a better solution can be found than dog-poo-bags in bins then everyone will be happier -- for example, instead of taking the poo home and putting it in your bin, take it home and put it down your toilet where all the human poo goes. Always assuming this is properly disposed of, obviously. And assuming that all dog-owners then do this instead of carrying on putting it in the bins.

 

In all these cases the key point is that if everyone does "the right thing" no draconian bans are needed. If it all goes bad and bans are brought in then it will be very clear where the blame lies.

Edited by IanD
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16 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

If you check back you will find that it was actually a 'pro bag & bin' poster who highlighted the problem of doggy-bags, and was even kind enough to extrapolate the daily tonnage produced by multiplying 7,000,000 dogs by an average of 350g per dog.

 

If anyone is to 'own' the responsibility for highlighting it, it is obvious to all, at whose door it should be laid.

I agree and I think it was only that poster who mentioned that a marina had banned boaters from putting dog poo bags in their bins. To me it looked as if having lost the nappy obsession they moved onto a dog angle to try to make his case by blinding us with his knowledge of the subject which was so much better than everyone elses, wasn't it? ? . 

 

There doesn't seem to be a straight forward solution to the dumping of human s*** in CRT bins and when reading the article on boat loos in Waterways World yesterday I was hoping it would be mentioned how BW managed to get boaters to stop dumping raw sewage into the canals from the sea cocks on their toilets but it wasn't mentioned. 

 

haggis

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5 minutes ago, haggis said:

I was hoping it would be mentioned how BW managed to get boaters to stop dumping raw sewage into the canals from the sea cocks on their toilets but it wasn't mentioned. 

 

It was done by the BSSC requiring the valves/sea cocks to be 'switched off' and (I think) only able to be made operable by the use of tools.

 

Maybe it was in another 'age' when boaters enjoyed boating and had more social responsibility but now for some (not all by any means) having a boat is just cheap living and they dont give a "bag of poop" about the waterways.

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24 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

It was done by the BSSC requiring the valves/sea cocks to be 'switched off' and (I think) only able to be made operable by the use of tools.

 

 

I wondered about that but did the sea cocks being made inoperable not come before the BSS was introduced? I don't know and can't be bothered going to check ? 

 

Haggis

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6 hours ago, doratheexplorer said:

And what are the chances that the most cost effective way, is to allow for putting poo in bins?  Enforcement is a costly business at the best of times.  Trying to enforce against people putting black bin bags in bins, on the off-chance that there may be some contraband in there would be ridiculously difficult and therefore very expensive.

Well that's much the same as my earlier suggestions so....

As it stands I would have thought that allowing the use of existing bins would not be cost effective especially as usage levels are low. CaRT (meaning boaters) would have to pay on the basis that every bin might have such waste in it even though only a few actually had any.

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1 minute ago, Mike Todd said:

As it stands I would have thought that allowing the use of existing bins would not be cost effective especially as usage levels are low. CaRT (meaning boaters) would have to pay on the basis that every bin might have such waste in it even though only a few actually had any.

It's not just whether it's cost effective -- why should all boaters should pay to allow a small minority to continue doing what they weren't supposed to have been doing in the first place?

 

Dora's preferred option of allowing a small (but increasing) number of boaters to carry on doing what they do today has also been ruled out by CaRT, and it seems that most boaters agree with this -- ignoring the argument about how CWDF members are not representative of boaters as a whole, which only people on one side of this discussion are claiming is the case...

 

If it's pretty much impossible to stop people putting the waste into the bins once they've made it -- which looks to be the case -- the only alternative is to stop them making it in the first place.

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5 minutes ago, IanD said:

and it seems that most boaters agree with this -- ignoring the argument about how CWDF members are not representative of boaters as a whole, which only people on one side of this discussion are claiming is the case...

 

 

You can't say that at all, the most you can say is out of a small number of active members on CWDF most disagree the dumping in bins is appropriate, the sample is far from most boaters 

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25 minutes ago, tree monkey said:

You can't say that at all, the most you can say is out of a small number of active members on CWDF most disagree the dumping in bins is appropriate, the sample is far from most boaters 

You are literally correct. Out of a relatively small sample of boaters (currently, about 70) on an internet forum about canals, 80% who expressed an opinion agreed with CaRT and say that bag'n'binning should stop. OK?

 

It's what all polls do, for example before elections, they don't try and canvass the views of 30M voters because it's impossible, they take a small and hopefully representative sample and extrapolate from the answers of those who reply -- if possible, adjusting for any demographic differences between the sample and the overall population. So now I'm going to get technical...

 

This doesn't make the poll invalid, but it does reduce the reliability of the results, as we've seen many times in the past. If the results are close or the poll sample doesn't represent the electorate they predict the wrong result -- the polls say 47% (actually, they said "43% to 52% within a 95% confidence range, but this is too difficult for most readers to understand...) and the result comes out at 52%, and this is trumpeted as "shock result -- election overturns poll predictions!". In fact it's within the predicted range of uncertainty.

 

So if the poo poll results here were anywhere close to 50:50 -- say in the range 40:60 to 60:40 -- it wouldn't be safe to conclude that they're correct about which side the majority is, because a 20% sampling error could easily tip the result the other way, and we don't know how well the boaters who voted are representative of all boaters.

 

An 80:20 result is extremely unlikely to be wrong about which way all boaters would vote if there was a "poo general election" tomorrow and 20000 of them turned out, even allowing for a huge population mismatch -- which is what you're suggesting, in spite of the fact that there's no reason to suspect this is the case.

 

If you don't understand this, I don't see how I can explain it more clearly without diving into statistics and sampling theory and the mathematics of sampling bias, which will send everyone to sleep.

Edited by IanD
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2 minutes ago, IanD said:

You are literally correct. Out of a relatively small sample of boaters (currently, about 70) on an internet forum about canals, 80% who expressed an opinion agreed with CaRT and say that bag'n'binning should stop. OK?

 

It's what all polls do, for example before elections, they don't try and canvass the views of 30M voters because it's impossible, they take a small and hopefully representative sample and extrapolate from that -- if possible, adjusting for any demographic differences between the sample and the overall population. So now I'm going to get technical...

 

This doesn't make the poll invalid, but it does reduce the reliability of the results, as we've seen many times in the past. If the results are close or the poll sample doesn't represent the electorate they predict the wrong result -- the polls say 47% (actually, they said "43% to 52% within a 95% confidence range, but this is too difficult for most readers to understand...) and the result comes out at 52%, and this is trumpeted as "shock result -- election overturns poll predictions!". In fact it's within the predicted range of uncertainty.

 

So if the poo poll results here were anywhere close to 50:50 -- say in the range 40:60 to 60:40 -- it wouldn't be safe to conclude that they're correct, because a 20% sampling error could easily tip the result the other way, and we don't know how well the boaters who voted are representative of all boaters.

 

An 80:20 result is extremely unlikely to be wrong about which way all boaters would vote if there was a "poo general election" tomorrow, even allowing for a huge population mismatch -- which is what you're suggesting, in spite of the fact that there's no reason to suspect this is the case.

 

If you don't understand this, I don't see how I can explain it more clearly without diving into statistics and sampling theory and the mathematics of sampling bias, which will send everyone to sleep.

So is 73 a representative sample, have you adjusted for the variables as you suggest?

The poll is interesting but it's not representative, I actually think if the poll was extended to make it representative the result may be similar but you can not make the claim that "most" boaters agree or not based on this poll

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3 minutes ago, tree monkey said:

So is 73 a representative sample, have you adjusted for the variables as you suggest?

The poll is interesting but it's not representative, I actually think if the poll was extended to make it representative the result may be similar but you can not make the claim that "most" boaters agree or not based on this poll

 

 

A bit like those 'shampoo' adverts (other products are available) that say 80% of 100 people asked agreed that their hair was more shiney.

Edited by Alan de Enfield
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44 minutes ago, IanD said:

ignoring the argument about how CWDF members are not representative of boaters as a whole, which only people on one side of this discussion are claiming is the case...

 

No Ian, only people who don't know many boaters think CWDF is representative of boaters as a whole. 

 

Most people out on the system either haven't heard of it or think it's full of grumpy old men ...

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2 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

No Ian, only people who don't know many boaters think CWDF is representative of boaters as a whole. 

 

Most people out on the system either haven't heard of it or think it's full of grumpy old men ...

Oy and grumpy younger men (relatively)

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44 minutes ago, tree monkey said:

So is 73 a representative sample, have you adjusted for the variables as you suggest?

The poll is interesting but it's not representative, I actually think if the poll was extended to make it representative the result may be similar but you can not make the claim that "most" boaters agree or not based on this poll

Yes. The inaccuracy due to the sample size is OK -- again, I'd need to dive into variance and confidence intervals, but for example 77 is the minimum sample size we use at work for device testing (mandated by telecomms specifications) when if we get it wrong it could cost us tens of million of dollars. It's a different field but the mathematics behind the numbers are the same. Of course more is better, and you certainly wouldn't rely on this number to try and guarantee a result within maybe a few percent of the correct one, you'd want a bigger sample

 

The unknown is how representative (or not) the sample is of the entire population, and this doesn't depend on sample size, it depends on how variable the population is. If you don't know anything about how good your sample is, a standard test is to see if the result changes with a big change in the relative size of the two votes, and a 2:1 change is considered to give a pretty safe prediction if it doesn't alter the result. So less than a 2:1 majority (67:33) might lead you to the wrong conclusion, if your population is extremely skewed -- which we don't have any evidence for here, but it's a worst-case assumption. This in one reason that these numbers are often taken as a "supermajority" so there can't be any possible claim that the result doesn't match the actual population.

 

An 80:20 result makes it pretty much impossible that the result is wrong, even with the largest conceivable sampling mismatch between the poll and all boaters.

Edited by IanD
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19 minutes ago, TheBiscuits said:

 

No Ian, only people who don't know many boaters think CWDF is representative of boaters as a whole. 

 

Most people out on the system either haven't heard of it or think it's full of grumpy old men ...

I didn't say that CWDF or the poll results were accurately representative of boaters as a whole and never have done, because this is obviously not true. However given the results of the poll, they don't have to be super-accurate, because even if they're not the result won't change (see post with maths in).

 

What I wrote (read it!) is that the only people that are claiming that this is an issue -- very possibly because they want to claim the results are wrong, like Trump -- are those who want to allow bag'n'binning to continue.

 

And they'd be right, if the results were anywhere close to 50:50 the poll would be unreliable. But they're not, and it isn't ?

Edited by IanD
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5 minutes ago, IanD said:

I didn't say that CWDF or the poll results were accurately representative of boaters as a whole and never have done, because this is obviously not true. However given the results of the poll, they don't have to be super-accurate, because even if they're not the result won't change (see post with maths in).

 

What I wrote (read it!) is that the only people that are claiming this -- very possibly because they want to claim the results are wrong, like Trump -- are those who want to allow bag'n'binning to continue.

You said most boaters agree that poo dumping is wrong and then say

 

"I didn't say that CWDF or the poll results were accurately representative of boaters"

 

So either its "most" boaters or an unrepresentative sample say its bad

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9 minutes ago, tree monkey said:

You said most boaters agree that poo dumping is wrong and then say

 

"I didn't say that CWDF or the poll results were accurately representative of boaters"

 

So either its "most" boaters or an unrepresentative sample say its bad

 

Go on, keep arguing about which exact word I used all you want -- I'm sure you can find an error somewhere in the endless pages of tedious facts (and opinions, remember everyone's got one...) I've been churning out.

 

It's called arguing by distraction, like nappies and dog-poo, to divert attention away from the elephant in the room -- or in this case, the uncomposted poo in the bag.... ?

 

BTW, saying a sample is not known to be representative (what I said) is not the same as saying it's known to be unrepresentative (what you're claiming) -- it's Donald Rumsfeld all over again. Neither of us knows if it's representative or not, there's no way to tell unless you can find a way to collect votes from 20000 boaters. There's a challenge for you...

Edited by IanD
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1 minute ago, IanD said:

 

 

It's called arguing by distraction, like nappies and dog-poo, to divert attention away from the elephant in the room -- or in this case, the uncomposted poo in the bag.... ?

 

No, its showing that you have churned out that much crap you cannot even recall what you have said or be consistent.

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3 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

Go on, keep arguing about which exact word I used all you want -- I'm sure you can find an error somewhere in the endless pages of tedious facts (and opinions, remember everyone's got one...) I've been churning out.

 

It's called arguing by distraction, like nappies and dog-poo, to divert attention away from the elephant in the room -- or in this case, the uncomposted poo in the bag.... ?

Not at all, you literally said most boaters, this was a mistake or an exaggeration, I don't care which, I pointed this out that's all.

No distraction, no argument, no aggression, what you claimed was wrong, we all make them, just accept it own up and move on

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2 minutes ago, matty40s said:

Ha ha ha, coming from you that is superb.

 

Lo and behold, the sad resident creepy internet stalker rocks up right on cue....

 

Pathetic little man.

 

 

Edited by The Happy Nomad
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