environmentally-friendly toilet paper substitute
We are trying not to buy anything new, including even unbleached recycled
toilet paper.  For a while I tried using it and composting it afterwards, to
add nitrogen to the soil, but you have to be careful using human excrement
on garden vegetables.  (Probably okay once it goes through a winter).  I have
tried using water instead of paper, but roommates  object to a wet toilet
seat.  A wet sponge for urine works, but starts to smell after a while
despite washing.  (A soak in vinegar helps).  Have tried pieces of old sheet,
composting them after use, but paper seems to work better.  Does anyone know
what the ink in phone books is made of, and is it nontoxic?  Other ideas

20 responses total.

Corn cobs are traditional....

I think anything other than paper would be worse - personally and
environmentally - except maybe taking a shower after each event...which
would waste a lot of water (more than it takes to make the paper, I
would venture).

How about one of those bidet thing-a-ma-jigs?  Or your own version
thereof?

Now there's a good, water saving, idea. I wonder if one can get them in
the USA? They are generally the butt of jokes about Americans travelling
in France (or rather, its the Americans' butts that are the joke..... :)).

What are you two doing on the computer before sunrise?
I would appreciate plans for making a bidet thing-a-ma-jig.  In eastern
Europe, there was just a bottle of water in the outhouse, but then there was
no toilet seat to get wet, just a hole in the mud floor to crouch over.
There was an indoor version with a porcelain floor, raised spots to put
your feet on, and it flushed.  People could not really afford toilet
paper, even when there were no artificial shortages (along with shortages
of milk, lightbulbs, laundry detergent and soap).
.

I encountered the porcelain "squat" toilet in southern Europe. Usually
if you produced nice 'packaged' stools, they worked fine. But if you got
the GIs from eating southern Europe fresh vegetables.....it was a different
matter. For bidets, why don't you start asking around with plumbing
dealers. Bidet is pronounced "bee-day". Then, tell us what you find, please!

I was thinking of some solution that would work in my apartment.  But I hear
the Japanese have a combination toilet-bidet that will wash and dry you.  And
something similar is sold for use by the disabled (at a very high price, I
assume).  Perhaps a combination of using a bottle of water, and then wiping
off the toilet seat with a washcloth?   The half of the world that uses water
considers the paper users to be quite unsanitary.  Does anyone know if there
is a correlation between squatters vs sitters and taking shoes off when you
enter the house so you can sit on the floor?  The ancient Greeks and Romans
liked to sit on chairs, but is there is chair tradition anywhere else besides
Europe and China?  The shoes-off boundary is somewhere in central Europe -
you take off your shoes in Turkey, Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia, Romania,
Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland but not apparently Italy or Greece
(where chairs have been around for a long time).  Do Chinese peasants, who
take their shoes off, all sit on chairs?  I think I have seen pictures of
people squatting to work or cook.

Keesan, traditionally, the header/first entry in an item defined the
content of the item, so that someone looking for a conversation about,
say, "environmentally friendly toilet paper substitute" could use the
"browse"  command, and then read only the items that contained information
they were interested in.  Changing the topic is generally referred to as
"drift".  Why dont you enter an item about squatters/sitters/taking shoes
off, so that later conference users can find that topic when they browse
the conference, and keep this one focused on "toilet paper substitutes".

I don't think it would stand on its own.... but since it *is* a toilet
paper substitute, it seems appropriate here (IMHO).

Thanks for your support, Rane, but this does seem to be getting a bit far from
paper substitutes.  If sitting/shoes seems like a topic of general interest,
would one of you like to enter it somewhere else?  (But where?).  I am still
interested in knowing the toxicity of the ink in phone books (on the theory
that it is better to use the paper directly than have it recycled into another
form of paper), but water does seem the best solution.

I don't think printing inks are toxic (though there are many different
formulations), but ink does transfer, so you'd get some ink on yourself.
There might be a greater drain plugging problem with phone-book paper
than with normal toilet paper.

That might be why it is also common in E. Europe to have a basket for toilet
paper and a sign saying that it might clog the toilet.  The stuff there is
a lot stiffer and more fibrous.  I will experiment with phone book on wet
skin.  It seems a bit softer than regular newsprint.

Does anyone have a composting toilet we could look at, and are they all
designed to operate by adding heat or running house air through them and to
the outside?

Does local code allow them?

We heard someone within city limits, the regional salesperson for Clivus
Multrum, invested a lot of time and money to get them approved.

The one time I read about a person installing one in the city, they had
to take the "compost" to the water treatment plant to have it incinerated.

Probably not water but sewage treatment, and perhaps they just treated it like
other sewage (purified it somehow before dumping it in the river).  So a
compositing toilet would save water, but not nutrients, in the city.  I have
heard that sewage is sometimes sold to tree farmers as fertilizer, but can't
be used on food crops because of disease potential.  The water treatment plant
gives interesting tours once a year or so, have not heard of the sewage
treatment plant doing so, but I may call and ask them how they operate.

Yes, I meant to say sewage treatment plant.  I have had tours of both the
sewage and water treatment plants in Ann Arbor.

Can you describe to us how sewage is treated in Ann Arbor?

I don't remember enough about it to be sure of my facts!  That was 
almost two decades ago.  *LOTS* has also changed in that time.

        There's a common fertilizer, Milorganite, which is made from the
Milwaukee waste treatment plant. MIL(waukee) ORG(anic) It's high in nitrogen
and a friend swears by it.

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