The Luggable Loo

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Picked up one of these at REI last week, 5 gal. Bucket, about $20. Looks to me like much better solution than the typical campers’ shitting in plastic bags, which end up in landfill. Ugh!

I would use either peat moss, sawdust, or rice hulls to cover each deposit. Ward Hensill makes an upgraded model of this and uses a plunger to compress everything.

No urine. Have 2 of these so when close to full, you let one sit while you fill the other. Then back into soil. Circle (cycle) completed.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

3 Responses to The Luggable Loo

  1. all good….sort of what’s old is now new..
    all the new environment “healthy” sort of ways of living/doing, would sure make my parents/grandparents smile and shake their heads in disbelief.

    We (the kids) thought we were poor…living on a farm with no electricity, no running water, outhouse, tin tub bath once week heated on wood stove, EVERYTHING made by Mom etc etc…..(including homemade butter and noodles and cottage cheese). Golly, turns out we were not poor. We were living healthy and friendly to the environment (believe you mean not a thing was wasted – couldnt afford to)…My parents would be so tickled to know, they could (now days) likely rent the back porch out as a genuine authentic evironmentlly friendly b and b (at a big price)…

    here is a link..you might enjoy.
    most likely you’ve seen this in person, but in case not. Looks interesting
    https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/3d-printing-could-help-build-homes-with-unique-designs-more-cheaply-advocates-say/ar-AAORi0u

    https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/50461670/photos?guests=1&adults=1

  2. Many, many years ago when I was young and carefree, we used to spend family holidays in a slightly converted fisherman’s cottage in a small village on the East Coast of England. It had no electricity and the water came from a single faucet just outside the front door. The best part was the outhouse at the bottom of the yard which, because of a high water table, was not a pit toilet but caught everything in a large bucket positioned under the wooden seat. Each time you finished doing your business, you poured a quantity of creosote-like liquid into the bucket to reduce the odor. When the bucket was getting full, you put a lid on it and carried it to the nearby tidal creek and poured it in. The was preferably done on a cloudy night with a falling tide, so that the unpleasant contents was carried out into the North Sea and not back into the village. If you met a neighbor on a similar mission, the convention was to totally ignore each other. This creek was home to some of the largest, juiciest crabs that I have ever seen but, strangely enough, no one ever ate them!

  3. A 5 gal bucket with pine or cedar shavings has been my travel composting toilet for years, and at 71, my partner and I use this in our 1998 Nash travel trailer we bought during the plague to travel between VT and Tucson every year. We didn’t want to have shit in the blackwater. The shavings make it all sweet smelling and we compost it when we get get to our destination. We never pee in it, and put paper in the basket to burn. I might get a soft seat though so the bucket doesn’t leave a crease on my butt.

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