- Paperback: 128 pages
- Publisher: Ecological Design Press,U.S.; illustrated edition edition (May 1995)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0964471809
- ISBN-13: 978-0964471801
- Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14 x 1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
2,976,095 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #20 in Books > Scientific, Technical & Medical > Environment > Recycling
- #34 in Books > Science & Nature > Earth Sciences & Geography > The Environment > Recycling
The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent reading for the smallest room,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water (Paperback)
The author of this one, Sim Van der Ryn has been designing alternative toilet and sewage systems for 40 years, and is currently Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Berkeley in California. The book, originally published in 1978 way ahead of its time, now revised and reprinted, has a wider scope than The Humanure Handbook, and covers the ground more succinctly. The starting point is a history of sanitary systems and a travelogue of how they do it in other cultures, followed by details of manufactured and home made wet or dry systems which will reduce water consumption and/or enable recycling of nutrients. Greywater systems are covered in a later section, and there is an excellent chapter with details on how we could revamp our tired (or non-existent in the Third World) urban sewage systems. Excellent reading for the smallest room.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews) 17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stop wasting waste--here's the why and the how,
By GENE GERUE "Author, Find Your Ideal Country Home" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water (Paperback)
Most farmers and gardeners fertilize soil using manure from the many animals except humans. Because of our diet, humanure is unsurpassed in nutrients. Asians have used it for thousands of years. Generations of families using flush toilets have resulted in psychological negativity--the yuck factor. So humanure is mostly wasted and goes into sewage treatment plants or septic systems, causing much unnecessary expense and pollution of groundwater. The most commonsense treatment of humanure is to collect it, compost it, and then use it for fertilizer for ornamentals and those plants that fruit above-ground: fruit trees, tomatoes, peppers, beans and the like. Humanure composted for a year is indistinguishable from rich soil. Van der Ryn provides here the why and the how.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating History and Current Eco-Toilet Design,
By Bugs "Patrick" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water (Paperback)
With a title like "Toilet Papers" and from a distinguished eco-architect like Sim Van der Ryn, I needed no intro or review to buy a copy of this little, but well researched historical over-view of effluent mitigation and current eco-friendly toilet design. This book is filled with good line drawings and photographs to depict everything from the historical perspective to the current dry toilets and their construction. The book starts out with: "Throughout this book, you will find the word "waste" used to refer to those raw materials-feces and urine-your body passes on to make energy available to some other form of life. This is what you give back to the earth. The idea of waste, of something unusable, reveals an incomplete understanding of how things work. Nature admits no waste. Nothing is left over; everything is joined in the spiral of life. Perhaps other cultures know this better than we, for they have no concept of, no word for, waste". And under that thought provoking consideration of resource cycles, there is: "A sound man is good at salvage, at seeing nothing is lost"- Lao Tze, 500 B.C. The intro is by Wendell Berry, farmer, novelist, poet. He posits that "modern" effluent mitigation is as insane as drinking right from an un-flushed toilet: "It is not inconceivable that some psychiatrist would ask me knowingly why I wanted to mess up my drinking water in the first place". Indeed. After the fascinating human waste history lessons, we are given a short crash-course on the biology of waste, then it's on to the fruit of the book: dry composting toilet designs and their efficacy. This is in good detail and makes for a complete handbook on waterless toilet design. Finally, there is the Epilogue and I would be amiss in my review if I did not reveal a little taste of it: [Any technology divorced from the whole of nature tends to produce a condition that poet Robert Graves calls "mechanarchy": the perfection of technological means to produce a chaotic sterile environment. The current technology of "waste disposal" (the term reveals the syndrome) is still fighting a war against nature, built on fragments of 19th century science not yet integrated into an understanding of life processes as a unified, but cyclical, whole."] True enough! Sim Van der Ryn has produced a gem of proper waste recycling in this informing little book. His website is well worth a visit also. An informative companion to "Toilet Papers" is "The Humanure Handbook" by Joseph Jenkins- a how-to on safely composting one's excrement back into a nutrient rich amendment for the vegetable garden instead of flushing it away as waste. 10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Water shortage???,
By D. Krstulovich - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water (Paperback)
As the world ponders how we will all survive as unpolluted water becomes scarcer and scarcer, eventually one has to ask, 'why do we go to the bathroom in a bowl of fresh drinking water????'
Please don't tell me that it's 'because that's the way we've always done it'. It's time for this book. Hopefully, it will be read by people who have the brains and guts and good-natured cleverness to actually do something cool and constructive and environmentally sound about these things. |
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