Incinolet toilets - any advice?

[Ollie Clifton]

Kia ora from NZ Alpine Club

We are currently in the process of replacing the old septic tank system at
one of our alpine huts on Mt Ruapehu, located in Tongariro National Park -
see this link for general info: http://alpineclub.org.nz/hut/ruapehu . The
national park now has a policy of removing all human waste - both faeces &
urine, for both environmental & cultural reasons.

One of the options we are considering is an electric powered incinerating
toilet - the only model we've managed to locate thus far is the Incinolet -
see http://incinolet.com/

I'd appreciate any advice or experiences people may have had with these
toilets.

Cheers
OLLIE CLIFTON
NZAC EXECUTIVE OFFICER

[Geoff Hill]

HI OLLIE CLIFTON

I'm conducting PHD research on human waste management in the Canadian high alpine.

I believe BC Parks tried a few propane powered incinerating toilets at the Bugaboos years ago.  They didn't work as the incinerating time was much too long during the heavy morning and evening traffic experienced at the 40 person Kain Hut and proximal Boulder Campground.  The toilets are also close to the hiking trail to the Applebee camp and used heavily by passers-by.  

I conducted urine diversion, dehydration, and 110V incineration experiments at UBC and at the Kain Hut, Bugaboo Park in 2010.  I used Elastec's Smart Ash barrel incinerator.  However, compared with large % mass reduction accomplished by urine diversion, 110V dehydration, and solar dehydration, the incineration was not cost effective.  It was also a PITA (pain in the ass).  

In a low use setting (<15 users / day), with ample available power (constant draw 10 amps 800w heater & fan, temporary draw 25amps 1500 watts incinerator), and a site operator, I believe the solids could be effectively dehydrated to <10% soil moisture, and incinerated with other trash (paper / cardboard).  However, any one of these that is not suitable, ie high use, low power, or no site operator, and the system probably will not be viable.

Urine can be evaporated... I think John Cocks might know of the person in NZ who was working on that project... RMNP also have functional urine evaporators.

I'd recon that urine diversion (with simple solar dehydration if your site is sunny) would be your most cost effective method of managing the waste.  Reduce the amount you have to fly out and and piggy back removal with other supply needs.  

Attached is a manuscript we're writing up on the topic.  

Funding provided by MEC, BEES, ACC, and UBC Geography.

[John Cocks]

Geoff

 

Good to get your comment. Thank you.

 

Yes, MWH did a desk top study looking at urine dehydration. It was based on climatologically data and  theory.  DoC had (and may be still has) a dehydration unit at Mt Cook that it was planning to use to test the theory.  The tests needed a researcher (eg research student) and funds, both of which were challenging at the  time to secure. Tom Hopkins was the DoC person leading this work at that time and may be able to give guidance about re-instigating the project.

 

Regards

 

John 

[Roger Robinson]

Hi Ollie,

Incinolet does put out good information but I have not heard from anyone on how well they work.

We have not tried electric but we did give a propane burning toilet a try for our staff and a few friends at the 7K basecamp on Denali for 2 months. Even with the best of intentions it turned out to be a failure. We tried to use it for human waste only, not urine, but the toilet could not keep up with the volume of 3-8 folks. Also, minimally trained staff flunked maintenance and it consumed a huge amount of propane!

Possibly the Japanese have experience with electric. They use white gas for incineration on Mt. Fuji for many of the huts and these receive extremely high use.

I think Geoff Hill's suggestion of urine diversion and evaporation of the feces is an excellent way to go.  This dried feces could be incinerated or packed out.

Another alternative is the Ecosphere system. The following quote is from, Loïc PERRIER of ECOSPHERE, he is a member of the Goggle Group. "PERRIER Loïc" <loic.p...@saniverte.fr>  His response is related to a discussion about the Baltoro Glacier in Pakistan.

"In 2007, we settled toilet in 4 400 m of height in the massif of the Mont Blanc. You can see in attached a picture of this toilet. For the season 2008-2009, we installed chips of temperature (called thermochron, range of use: 40 - 85 °C). You can see in the joined graph which the temperatures go down very low, often lower in-40°C (limit of use of the sensor). Naturally, toilet are not used during these period of big cold. However, the system continues to work for 3 years and we are going to realize a new serie of measure in 2011. Urines are spread.

We need some electricity. For dehydratation, we use 1.2W and 2 W pans for 1 carousel and an another one 1.2 W for the ventilation. All this pan work with 12 V from solar panels.
To limit the frost of urines, we use a 12V heating cable .

For this toilet with stake in bag, we size the system so that the customer intervene only once a year (draining of bags). Ventilators and battery have life expectancies from 5 to 8 years old.

There are several strategies for the bagged feces : spot incineration, descent in valley for incineration, descent in valley for composting or vermicomposting.


NB. : We have 10 toilets in Switzerland : Täschhütte (2700 m), Cabane de Saleinaz (2690 m), Leglerhütte (2273 m), Trifthütte (2520 m), Pra Cornet (1650 m), Cabane de Trient (3170 m), Carrouge , Wildstrubelhütte (2300 m), Chaman Lischana (2500m), Finisteraarhorn (3050 m) and Wildhorn (2300 m)"

Please let us know what you work out.

Thanks,

Roger

-- 
Roger Robinson

Coordinator "Managing Human Waste in the Wild"

Mountaineering Ranger, Denali National Park

Become part of the backcountry solution join our Google Group:

 <http://groups.google.com/group/managing-human-waste-in-the-wild>

Information about the Exit Strategies conference including presentation downloads:

<http://www.americanalpineclub.org/exitstrategies>

Human waste is a serious issue affecting our wild places and one we have the means to solve.

--
If you wish to receive a summary of "Abridged Email" of new activity each day, you can do so by going into "Edit My Membership" and select this option.

[Geoff Hill]

HI again, 

SWSloo has a dehydrating toilet that looks promising for the dehydration of fecal matter as well.  Add a urine diversion seat and urinal to minimize the amount of work it has to do to get the feces to <10% moisture suitable for incineration.

They demonstrated the big black unit and modular walls in Golden, CO.

http://www.swsloo.com/

Geoff Hill

BC 604.505.3656

geoff...@gmail.com

[Karen Rollins]

Ollie,

Although I think urine separation is the ticket, if you want to try out an incinerating toilet you should take a look at Storburn.

http://www.storburn.ca/ 

The US EPA did a comparison of Incinolet and Storburn in 1999, and found Storburn to work better and cost less.

http://www.p2pays.org/ref/12/11108.pdf

Karen

BEES Project Director

Karen Rollins
bees...@telus.net
www.beeshive.org

[Geoff Hill]

HI group, 

I dug up the email from Tay Hanson, Senior Ranger from Columbia Area (BC).

Here:

Apparently we’ve tried using a bank of incinerator style toilets called Storburn (www.storburn.ca/) up in the Bugaboos, but they couldn’t handle the quantity of waste, apparently being more suitable for single family use. Thought that might be useful in your planning/ comparisons.

 

Tay

-------------------------

From Storburn.ca website:

LARGE CAPACITY

The STORBURN toilet can be used 40 to 60 times in succession before incineration is necessary. It will accommodate the needs of 8 to 10 workers in an average 8 to 10 hour day or about 6 to 8 persons in a cottage or residence where the daily use would be about 16 hours.  Cycle takes up to 4-1/2 hours if chamber is full.    

-------------------------

My assessment:

I measured the fraction of liquids separable with urine diversion by recording door counts and weight the mass change of solids and liquids containment vessels.  Liquids comprise 60% of the waste stream mass or 3 of every 5 uses (assuming densities of poop = water (which are actually close due to high water content in poop).

So 40-60 uses means that this toilet is incinerating, or more accurately - boiling, 24-36 (avg = 30) urination visits per cycle.  The latent heat of vaporization is large (2257kj/kg).  The average alpine urination = 0.186kg +/-0.08.  Multiplying this by 30 uses =  5.58kg, meaning that 12600kj of chemical propane energy are used to simply evaporate urine.   This is equivalent to operating a highly efficient 4000 W generator for 1 hour (which if its diesel will consume between 3 and 6 L of fuel or 100-200ml diesel per toilet use).  Diesel emits 2.6kg CO2 equivalent emissions per litre.  Thus each Storburn toilet use emits 260-520g CO2 equivalent emissions just to evaporate urine, which does not include evaporating liquid entrained within the poop or combusting the organic material.  Propane efficiency is similar to gasoline, both of which are less efficient than diesel in a power generator.   This does not sound sustainable to me. 

As you can see, I'm a strong proponent of quantifying the performance of these waste management systems so that we are able to use a common set of tools and language in the determination of performance, cost, impact, and ultimately, sustainability.

Perhaps it would be worth testing an incinerating toilet with urine diversion?  It would be interesting to know if it could hold 60% more uses in the same fashion as barrel fly out barrels can.

Geoff Hill

BC 604.505.3656

geoff...@gmail.com

[Geoff Hill]

HI group, 

In the earlier email, I omitted the energy required to heat the urine up from its ambient alpine summer temperature to its boiling point because it is a relatively small requirement compared to the phase change.  However, for completeness I'll jot some calculations below.

Ambient alpine summer temp. of outdoor toilet = 10C.

At 4.2kj/kg/deg C and 90C between 10C and 100C, we get 378kj/kg heat required.  Add this to the latent heat of vaporization (2257kj/kg) and we get 2636kj/kg required to bring urine from 10C to evaporated.  From below we have 5.58kg of urine per incineration cycle which thus requires 14,700 kj (only a 10-20% increase from the earlier calculations).  

Geoff

earlier email

----------------

I dug up the email from Tay Hanson, Senior Ranger from Columbia Area (BC).

Here:

Apparently we’ve tried using a bank of incinerator style toilets called Storburn (www.storburn.ca/) up in the Bugaboos, but they couldn’t handle the quantity of waste, apparently being more suitable for single family use. Thought that might be useful in your planning/ comparisons.

 

Tay

-------------------------

From Storburn.ca website:

LARGE CAPACITY

The STORBURN toilet can be used 40 to 60 times in succession before incineration is necessary. It will accommodate the needs of 8 to 10 workers in an average 8 to 10 hour day or about 6 to 8 persons in a cottage or residence where the daily use would be about 16 hours.  Cycle takes up to 4-1/2 hours if chamber is full.    

-------------------------

My assessment:

I measured the fraction of liquids separable with urine diversion by recording door counts and weight the mass change of solids and liquids containment vessels.  Liquids comprise 60% of the waste stream mass or 3 of every 5 uses (assuming densities of poop = water (which are actually close due to high water content in poop).

So 40-60 uses means that this toilet is incinerating, or more accurately - boiling, 24-36 (avg = 30) urination visits per cycle.  The latent heat of vaporization is large (2257kj/kg).  The average alpine urination = 0.186kg +/-0.08.  Multiplying this by 30 uses =  5.58kg, meaning that 12600kj of chemical propane energy are used to simply evaporate urine.   This is equivalent to operating a highly efficient 4000 W generator for 1 hour (which if its diesel will consume between 3 and 6 L of fuel or 100-200ml diesel per toilet use).  Diesel emits 2.6kg CO2 equivalent emissions per litre.  Thus each Storburn toilet use emits 260-520g CO2 equivalent emissions just to evaporate urine, which does not include evaporating liquid entrained within the poop or combusting the organic material.  Propane efficiency is similar to gasoline, both of which are less efficient than diesel in a power generator.   This does not sound sustainable to me. 

As you can see, I'm a strong proponent of quantifying the performance of these waste management systems so that we are able to use a common set of tools and language in the determination of performance, cost, impact, and ultimately, sustainability.

Perhaps it would be worth testing an incinerating toilet with urine diversion?  It would be interesting to know if it could hold 60% more uses in the same fashion as barrel fly out barrels can.

Geoff Hill

BC 604.505.3656

geoff...@gmail.com

On 2011-03-16, at 9:08 AM, Karen Rollins wrote: