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A council's incentives for compost toilets |
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Score
85%
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68 votes,
Feasibility
0%
Originality
0%
Humour
0% |
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The municipal council of Tanum (population 12,000), on the west coast of Sweden, has used financial incentives to reduce the number of mains toilets in the community.
Tanum is a sparsely populated community with several thousand holiday homes. To connect all the permanent residents, not to mention the summer guests, to sewerage and install modern cleaning plants would have been extremely expensive.
The council was also convinced that the WC was an ecological blunder - instead of nutrients being returned to the soil, clean water is used to wash them out to sea, where they become pollutants (even after partial cleaning); and then farmers have to use chemical fertilisers to replace the lost nutrients.
'For new homes they would give ready permission only for composting toilets'
To close the nutrient cycle, politicians in Tanum decided that for new homes they would give ready permission only for composting or urine-separating toilets (meaning toilets where the urine, which contains most of the nutrients, goes into a storage tank). They also decided that people who already had WCs should be encouraged to replace them.
The municipality did not have the power to ban WCs outright, but permission to install one was made dependent on an environmental assessment in each case - and even if one got the permission, there was a strong disincentive, as hooking up to a sewer was charged at 60,000 SEK (about £3,150). As a result, only two or three out of the 40 to 50 new houses being built each year come with WCs.
Those who opt for other solutions can avoid outgoing mains connections altogether and can in most cases allow the grey water to infiltrate into the ground. Those already connected to sewers have their annual service fee cut by 50 per cent if they convert to composting or separating toilets.
In particular, a number of farmers in Tanum now use urine or composted toilet wastes on their land.
Tanum's example has since inspired other Swedish communities to include goals for human waste recycling in their Local Agenda 21 plans.
Birgitta Jonsson, Environment Department, Tanum municipality, S-457 81 Tanumshede , Sweden (tel 00 46 525 182 82, fax 00 46 525 183 00).
• You can buy an exemplary and comprehensive guide to the subject, the Composting Toilet System Book, by David Del Porto and Carol Steinfeld, for £19.95 from Green Books. Click on the image below:
This scheme won the year 2000 Social Innovations Award in the Ecology category. The following is adapted from an item entitled 'Tanum declares war on WCs' which appeared in the Norwegian Ideas Bank (Stiftelsen Idebanken, PO Box 2126 Grünnerlokka, Norway, tel 00 47 2203 4010; fax 00 47 2236 4060; e-mail: idebanken@online.no; web: www.idebanken.no).
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