Building Liberty's Composting Toilets

in ecotrain •  7 years ago 

Liberty Festival... a festival for freedom of expression. The goal is to have fun and if you wish, experience transfomation from a community minded point of view.

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What a nice break it's been. It was hot and the horse flies enjoyed all the fresh human blood from the 100 or so people at Liberty Festival (the mosquitos also had their feast), but there was a lake all to ourselves and we spent most of our time in the water!

We were invited to help build composting toilets. The festival aims to have a minimal carbon footprint and a Do it Yourself with available material attotude... my kind of game!

When we got to the festival grounds, someone had dug 5ft trenches near the two camping areas.

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Lucky us the property owner offered to dig... and guess who got to operate the machine?

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Once the holes were dug, we set out to build a frame for the seats of the toilets out of scrap wood they had from the previous year. You will see later how we filled in the gaps once we ran out of dimentional material (plywood and lumber).

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So basically these toilets were simple boxes built over a trench like an old school outhouse or latrine. Not quite what I had in mind when we talked about composting toilets, but I was interested to experience how this technique works in a festival setting.

And I guess over time, once filled back in, it will compost...

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Here's a look at what the finished product looked like:

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There are two toilets there, we built two boxes like this one for the festival.

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The gaps I was telling you about earlier were filled with random sticks and moss was stuffed anywhere there was a hole to block any potential smells from coming out.

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And that's all for our Woodsy Composting Toilets, as they were called. Towards the end of the week they started smelling a bit, not nearly as much as the typical plastic prta-loos do but they were definitely an improvement.

I have seen proper Compost Toilets at festivals accross europe and they were amazing. All you can smell is the saw dust used to cover your tracks! When these thinhs are done right, they are really really nice.

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Liberty is a growing festival where learning from trial and error is part of the process! We will be going back for sure. The connections we made there are forged and we want to play our part year after year. We had so much fun!!!

Don't Except Anything, Experience Everyhing!

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Temporarily fixed this old thing!

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The Pyramid

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The Stage

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The Little Prince's Waggon, salvaged from the dump

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He really was like a prince in that thing!

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A natural dye workshop

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Can you see the floating dock we built put there? Six 55 gallon drums under a wood platform and voilà!

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Lake Art

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Truck Art

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The Signs of Liberty:

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Looks like a good time, this is a once a year type festival?

Yeah, it's the 4th year so far. It's most of our Burning Man friends who are there too! Hopefully next year there will be more kids.

It was really fun. How's your build going?

Oh, it's coming along slowly, lol. We have one more rafter and 6 purlins left to put up and get the frame finished. Hopefully, we can get it closed in the next time Jay is home, he will only be off for nine days this time so our building time will be cut 5 days shorter than usual.

Hey, sorry I forgot to relpy to you. So has Jay arrived yet? At least you guys will finish by winter for sure!!!

Jay won't be home for another week yet and only home for 7 days this time, so he won't even be coming straight home. I will be packing up next week and meeting him at the cabin trail to head out.
Dallas and I were just out there taking in a few supplies that will be needed when Jay is back. We may have a fallen tree on the cabin when Jay and I get out there too, it was just too unpredictable to cut down since it was much too windy.
Yes it will definitely be up by winter! :)

Oh no I hope there was no tree on the build!!! You guys really are worrior... doing the work for real and with Jay only coming home to build little by little is impressive.

For sure it will be done by winter the way you're going!

Very cool post. Looks like a great festival. Lake looks beautiful. Thanks for posting these pictures.

You're welcome, thanks for taking a look! Good thing there was a lake... we were in the middle of a nasty heat wave


This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account after manual review.

Thank you @c-squared!!! I appreciate it.

I am sure it will be an amazing festival, how could it not when it is in such great place surrounded with beautiful nature. All your work looks great, and you are doing an awesome job with this 💚

Thank you so much @zen-art... hopefully more people come with little people next year! We loved it it was very fun and small enough we met almost everyone didn't know!

oh wow! What a cool festival. I Really enjoyed reading this @senorcoconut!

Thank you @walkerland! One of our new favorite festivals!

Looks like a fun time was had by all. We are thinking of doing a composting toilet to get us by till a proper septic can be put in out at the ranch.

It was so fun... didn't wanna leave!

This toilet is what we will build next on oir property:
https://permaculturenews.org/2014/07/30/composting-toilets-made-wheelie-bins/
Made from a wheelie bin

nice work buddy! that looks like a Fantastic festival! nice and cozy and not too commercial! enjoy!!!!

Thanks @eco-alex! It was amazing and full of love!!! Very cozy too, yep. It was very Burning Man inspired.

Nice photo, I just noticed you changed your profile pic!

Peace

Awesome job love it 😍

Thanks! We could have done a better job on the privacy end of it. The fabric was a bit see through.

Just upvoted and followed you nice post

Thank you. I will look at your page soon enough 😁

Good job. I hope your success

Ah thank you so much, it was a success!

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What a great Festival! 😍 Do you know the date and the place for the next one?

Not yet! But it probably will happen around the same date at the same lake.

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Looks like fun! Where is this located?

It was a blast! We were near Utica, New York

North Central NY, I am in NE Oklahoma; may have to offer you moral support, LOL! I does look like you had a lot of fun; I enjoy anything that involves prepping.

;)

I'm always open to moral support... We chose NY for our homestead because of friends, family and the proximity to Europe (none stop flights). We are building for self reliance and who knows if there is a massive economic downfall one day, we'll be prepared!

If nothing happens, and we recover this crash dive; you have picked an excellent quality of life! If the SHTF, you have picked an excellent quality of life; I see no downside here, LOL!

The last time My Son went to Europe (Rome) he had one stopover of about 90 minutes, I thought from Dallas. Family happens, and they are nice to have close! Better plan on some extras for SHTF scenarios.

Stay Blessed! :)

True true, thank you for that, I do believe it is an excellent way of life we picked. Hard, but rewarding. I'm definitely not a dooms day type but we are for sure prepping for self reliance!

Cheers

I am not preparing for doomsday, but I am preparing to be off grid, to save time and money.

Yea, same reasons here!

really nice looking festival @senorcoconut, just the kind I would love to go to, I am at home in the woods and to have that lake as well, it looks all very lush. Is it mainly workshops? what sort of music. thanks for sharing and well done on the toilets, be interesting to know if they compost? looks like they would get too compact to me xx

It was about half workshops, half music. The music was all electronic except for one day an older fella came from town with his guitar to play us somebold country songs!

The lake was for sure a beautiful thing to have, we had a heat wave that week too.

I would be curious to find out if it composts too... according to the Loveable Loo guy who wrote the Humanure Handbook the compacting doesn't hurt it. He actually never turns his conpost pile, but it is layered!

Oh my! this brings back some funny memories. My brother built a composting toilet in his adobe house back in the late 1980s and that damn thing STANK THE WHOLE HOUSE OUT. Urgh! :) :) :) Thank the Goddess for the internet and the free flow of "how to" information! :)

Lol, no good if it smells up the house!!! Yes for sure with youtube university, a lot of mistakes can be avoided!