At the beginning of this engaging 7-minute video from Dwell, Gardiner introduces us to her composting toilet. It's a good way to meet the charmingly blunt Gardiner, who gets pretty cozy with excrement (human and otherwise) over the course of her presentation.
Gardiner is working on a new waterless toilet system at the Design London Imperial College. Her challenge: to create a toilet for city dwellers that uses no energy, and turns waste "into a commodity." She experiments with feeding feces to worms in a compost bin, and sculpting shapes out of horse manure, as she attempts to capture not only the function of a modern toilet, but also its essence: that is, the ability to flush -- to take things that are unpleasant, and eliminate them and their evidence quickly and completely from our lives.
Her portable, low-tech LooWatt effectively captures odor and allows human waste (which we produce on the order of 2 lbs per day, per person) to be turned into a source of energy via anaerobic digestion. With 40 percent of people globally in need of sanitary facilities, it's well worth imagining a solution that doesn't flush drinking water down the toilet. (JL)
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