Excellent, it looks like we all want to talk about toilets on boats.
Here are just a few of the options:
Composting toilet
Marine toilet
Incinerating toilet
Anaerobic digester
Urine diverting toilet
Here is a quick primer for seasteading and the #2 question everyone always asks:
Seasteading. Where does the poop go?Composting toiletThis is a very simple solution which can easily be used on a seapod.
Here are our friends the Wynns explaining the intricacies of their composting toilet they had on their RV which they then installed in their boat.
https://www.gonewiththewynns.com/compost-toilet-big-questionsThe downside to the composting toilet is that the user experience is not seamless. Good for people living there long term but we do not want people coming to visit for vacation learning a new toilet procedure using coconut husk or sawdust.
There are certainly a lot of different composting toilets, our storage is a few meters below the toilet so we have the benefit of the waste being far below the toilet which helps with smell.
Marine toiletThis is what we had on the first seastead. On that one we chose to use fresh water to flush but on our boats we used salt water. In Thailand all of the boats just flush out to sea so that's what we did as well. Our boat didn't even have a waste tank.
Here in Panama we will not be letting anything into the water so we will have a black water tank (even though the current boats in the marina and anchorage do not follow any sort of clean waste procedure). We will have a service for pumping out peoples' black water tanks. Fairly simple, the technology has been around and proven for decades.
The upside of these toilets is the user experience is the same as being at home. The downside being the need to pay for a service to come pump out your black water.
Incinerating toiletThere are several different types of incinerating toilets, the one we are looking at has the same user experience with a hose that runs down to the incinerator. You just dump the ash every couple of months.
We are leaning toward this one.
The upside is that the user experience is the same as a marine toilet. There is no need for pumping out the black water and for vacationers the maid can just empty the ash periodically.
The downside is the cost and the energy usage. Fortunately here in Panama natural gas is cheap so using a natural gas incinerator may keep the price down for energy usage.
Anaerobic digesterSeasteader, Jeff Frusha, just started his company in Texas creating anaerobic digesters which converts poop into biogas. He has been pushing this for years on the seasteading forums. I have been in contact with him and he is open to adapting his design for the space we have on the seapod.
Here is an explanation of how to build a bio digester.
http://www.solarcities.eu/education/388Urine diverting toiletThough not a type of waste disposal system, this can be used with any of the above systems. It helps to separate the urine from the poop. The key being that the mixing of the urine and poop creates the toxicity while poop alone will break down in hours on its own, urine on its own is fairly sterile. Though you need to factor in the prescription drugs that people take along with caffeine and other things so the waste cannot be used for anything useful unless you know that the people living there are not ingesting chemicals that would harm the plants or other things you may use the compost for.
While this is all fascinating stuff, our goal is to have experts in each field focus on these things for us. We will likely buy off the shelf products for our first few models as we use what works as much as possible due to the amount of custom engineering needed for everything else. So our focus is on the incinerating toilet first until we have an expert in toilet technology come down to our
incubator to design something specific to our design. There is a $4k incinerating toilet that we will buy for the first model that can hose the waste down into the storage area where the incinerator will sit.
We have promised the Panama government that we will not dump any waste into the sea. So, just like almost every other thing here in Panama, we are not following what the locals actually do and we are going above and beyond what most of the world does.
The fish do not get the benefits of our waste thanks to peoples' feelings.