Worm Composting Toilet

Worm Composting Toilet

I have long thought of creating a composting toilet for my garden. As I did not want to pay big dollars for one my thoughts were always towards a longdrop type (which I have heaps of experience at building) but was a bit concerned how this would fit into a suburban situation. I’m not worried about the illegally of it (I am a pirate after all!) but whether neighbours would notice and complain to the council.

In reading Delvin’s post about building a worm composting box and getting inspired to making one myself I started having thoughts of a worm composting toilet – why not?

I was so excited this afternoon about worm composting that I nipped out of work to visit the father of one of my employee, Jess. Rob's big into worm composting - he even maintains a worm composting bin at his office building. He gave me heaps of great advice about worms as his receptionist kept rolling her eyes.

In doing a search for “worm composting toilets” I discovered this great simple New Zealand built composting toilet, the KiwiBog . It costs way more ($1100) than I’d ever pay but it’s so simple any handyperson could built one similar by constructing a nice wooden cabinet instead of the fibreglass unit. The only part that would possibly be best to buy would be the urinal tray ($76) – the rest could be constructed for next to nothing. I think though that i will experiment with designing and building a urinal tray. You could easily do without the urinal tray, however, if users made sure they didn't pee into the toilet when pooing. Pee is what makes longdrops and composting toilets smell.

This KiwiBog is similar in simplicity to Hundertwasser’s composting humus toilet except it separates the pee before it goes into the bucket.
Their website mentions using a plastic liner bag in the bucket but starch bags are now readily available and totally bio-degradable and reasonably cheap at around 50 cents each.

There are lots of composting toilets on the market but most of them are much more complex than they need to be. Simple is best!

I like the idea of letting the worms do the work and thereby speeding the composting process up.


I am going to build my version of the kiwibog over the next few weeks and record the progress with photos.