Hola Elizabeth,

Thank you so much for helping me in "Quoting" the source.

You are exactly correct where I quoted the information.

More than helpful!!

Pura Vida,

Clint

Hi Clint,

You wrote "Quoting from the internet" but didn't provide the source of WHERE on the internet? I guess it's from Wikipedia's article on helminths:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminths#Eggs

The text looked very familiar to me... No wonder, as I helped write it!

If anyone would like to know more about why I work on Wikipedia pages and how you could do the same, please see here on the forum: forum.susana.org/forum/categories/198-wi...le-bit-of-their-time

It shows once again that Wikipedia is important. Where did Clint turn to, to find out more about helminth eggs? Wikipedia! So we should make sure the information is accurate.

Regards,
Elisabeth

P.S. I am looking forward to the new Wikipedia article on vermicomposting digesters that Dean is working on...

Hola Goeco,

After having returned from Costa Rica installing rainwater harvesting/greywater treatment/utilization and ozone laundry energy/water/chemical reducing technologies I finally had the time to review your latest message regarding Helminth eggs, of which I really knew nothing.

Obviously, your concerns regarding these parasites are valid, as the quoted information states, but also as quoted, there is an immediate and effective solution by utilizing technology and free energy from the sun for direct heat, evaporation and disinfection if desired with significant amounts of ozone, which can also be economically created and utilized effectively.

Quoting from the internet

Due to this strong shell, helminth eggs or ova remain viable in soil, fresh water and sewage for many months. In feces, fecal sludge and sewage sludge they can even remain viable for several years.[10][11] Helminth eggs of concern in wastewater used for irrigation have a size between 20 and 90 μm and a relative density of 1.06–1.23.[8] It is very difficult to inactivate helminth eggs, "unless temperature is increased above 40 °C or moisture is reduced to less than 5%.[8]"

Helminth eggs contained in wastewater, sewage sludge or human excreta are not always infectious, i.e. able to cause the disease helminthiasis. Fertilized eggs and unfertilized eggs can exist side by side. Unfertilized eggs are identifiable under the microscope by their elongated shape. No larvae can hatch from these kinds of eggs. Therefore, unfertilized eggs do not pose a danger to human health.

In the case of Ascaris lumbricoides (giant roundworm), which has been considered the most resistant and common helminth type, fertilized eggs deposited in soil are resistant to desiccation but are, at this stage of development, very sensitive to environmental temperatures: The reproduction of a fertilized egg within the eggshell develops at an environmental soil temperature about 25 °C which is lower than the body temperature of the host (i.e., 37 °C for humans).[19]

"However, development of the larvae in the egg stops at temperatures below 15.5 °C, and eggs cannot survive temperatures much above 38 °C." If the temperature is around 25 °C, the infectiousness occurs after nearly 10 days of incubation.[7][27][28] Finally, after 2 to 4 weeks in moist soil at optimal temperature and oxygen levels, the embryo develops into an infective larva, named "second-stage larva". This larva has the ability to get out of the egg, hatch in the small intestine and migrate to different organs. These infective larvae (or "infective eggs") may remain viable in soil for two years or longer.[19]

In order to physically remove (but not inactivate) helminth eggs from wastewater, processes that remove particles, such as sedimentation, filtration or coagulation-flocculation are employed.[29][30] Therefore, waste stabilization ponds (lagoons), storage bassins, constructed wetlands, rapid filtration or upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactors can be used. These conventional wastewater treatment processes do not inactivate the helminth ova but only removes them from the wastewater and moves them to the sewage sludge.

Helminth ova cannot be inactivated with chlorine, UV light "or ozone (in the latter case at least not with economical doses because >36 mg/L ozone are needed with 1 hour contact time)."

"Inactivation of helminth ova can be achieved in sewage sludge treatment where the temperature is increased over 40 °C or moisture is reduced to less than 5%.[8] Best results can be obtained when both of these conditions are combined for an extended period of time.[31] Details about the contact time under these conditions and other related environmental factors are generally not well-defined for every type of helminth egg species.[7] Helminth eggs are considered highly resistant biological structures.[8]"

I find your inclusion of a "false floor or french fry basket" aeration improvement invigorating but I totally disagree with you regarding the need for a carbon source for porosity advantages alone not to mention a transportation infrastructure for vermiculture.

I totally agree with you that the traditional old two rotating vessel concept does slowly decompose/evaporate human feces but, we were given the ability to improve our own existence and longevity by utilizing our own grey matter to its greatest advantage and that means using technology to expand our finite resources to their greatest advantage.

My concept of human resource recovery involves free energy utilizing technologies to treat and recover resources from previously as preached "wastes" as quickly as technologically possible in order to return those valuable/finite mineral resources back to our agricultural environment safely.

Our composting/vermiculture technologies mix the carbon source and the incoming human and organic food scrap resources immediately to create an optimal environment for not only all of Carl's aerobic and anaerobic critters but also Hajo's beneficial redworms (vermiculture).

The reason for our technologically improved automated design is to treat and to be able to recover the solid and liquid resources as quickly and safely as possible with a pre-manufactured, self-contained, double-walled vessel, containing the agitators, augers and liquid pumping systems.

Yearly, a much smaller in size conventional service septic pumping vehicle/trailer removes the freshly mixed and, normally providing a 1 year of composting/vermiculture retention time, before easy removal from the bottom with the augers. That "fresh", 90% removed in volume material, is then further composted in that separate mobile composting vessel on the vehicle/trailer, which will then be subjected to free solar heat and evaporation environments to maintain the above 40 degrees C temperatures for whatever period of time, thereby ensuring safe agricultural resources for immediate agricultural non-human edible reuse and recycle.

Whether it be Costa Rica or Bangladesh, as the automobile and cell phones developed, so shall onsite, automated, pre-manufactured water supply and wastewater treatment and recycling systems evolve utilizing technologies designed to maximize the utilization of our planetary resources everywhere and especially in "Developing" countries without the burden of an existing DOOMED piped infrastructure.

"The Rain Man"
El Hombre de la Lluvia
Clint

Dear Goeco,

There are many ways of accomplishing volume reduction and my assumtion is that the process might go through many different stages during the course of its hopefully long life. It has been thought that the ultimate reduction is accomplished through combustion with a remaining ash content. But that again presupposes an aerobic process and in reality the process in the compostera tank over decades goes through a mix of aerobic but with anaerobic pockets in the mass. The gases from which can contain small amounts of sulphur and other gases not expected in a purely aerobic environment. Those gases turn out to often be absorbed by the aerobic environment surrounding the anaerobic pocket and end up not having the odors we would expect. Not unless we stir the pile and release those gases.

The sum total is sometimes that more can leave over decades than we would anticipate from a purely aerobic processing. So it has not been beneficial to design the system for any one special and exclusive process like vermicomposting but allow for several conditions to exist without supposing just one...

Dear Carl,

I never accused you of ‘not having a working system’ but I tried to find out how the CompostEra works (as a vermi-composting system) although its condition do not match with specifications I had read in books (by Appelhof and Pilkington) about vermi-composting.

I had accepted that you cannot send me addresses of your customers and had proposed instead that you give my email to some of your customers and they may contact me if they wish so (my posting of 16.06.).

I am tired of these discussions getting personal and I will not respond to this arguing anymore.

Ciao
Hajo

Dear Hajo,

I think you have to take some responsibility for the discourse in this forum. Clivus was the first commercial composting toilet in the world with the prototyp from 1939 and this cement tank is still in my backyard in Sweden and still working fine by the way. So when you are starting the trail there will be followers, and some of them break out on their own for as many reasons as there were people doing it. Some of them thought they had better ideas, some wanted to keep the money from sales and manufacture a copy and some started their own variety (like the systems sitting on the floor of the bathroom). If you invite their opinion of CompostEra, you will naturally get their opinion of why their product is better or best.

When we call CompostEra a long-term processing toilet it is meant to be able to go the distance … not to be the fastest composter, not to be the simplest to install and as we started to talk about, not the ideal vermiculture set up focusing only on that. Mathematically, if you maximize any parameter, all other variables become irrelevant and that is seldom the optimum long term function.
CompostEra is a marathon runner not a sprinter !

But the discourse started when you and Clint accused me of not having a working system because
1. a competitor makes a claim that it doesn’t work,
AND
2. because I won’t send you our customer listing ... what are you saying? ... should I violate the trust of our customers, who we have promised not to share their names and info in public ?

This is the only reason I did not send you any references which I stated the first time but you took that to mean that we didn’t have any references! If you privately would like to talk to people having had the CompostEra installed for several years, you can write me in private but then you have to promise not to publish their names unless they explicitly grant you that permission. I trust any other serious company would say the same.

All the best
Carl

Volume reduction is a very simple thing to achieve. Its not rocket science to significantly reduce the volume of feces by composting. Simply provide the right conditions and you get the results. What interests me is providing the right conditions simply and cheaply and from local materials. A good vermicomposting digester does need to offer sustainable sanitation, not just compost. If well designed, the compost can be safe and of good quality.

You do not need pine bedding or a carbon source.
You do not need augers, agitators or float switches.

You do need good drainage.
You do need good ventilation and not just from above.

The concrete dyi concept is very viable with vermicomposting digesters, there are very good examples emerging in Africa seeded by Re-invent the Toilet.

A conservatively designed vermicomposting digester would:

• be wide so the heap's horizontal spread is not limited.
• have ventilation underneath, above and all sides (e.g. "french fry basket" or "perforated suspended floor").
• have drainage that is assured of always draining away from under the bedding (i.e. never flood the substrate).

This will ensure efficient operation under all hydraulic loading and seasonal conditions, by following these basic rules.

The technology is simple and well proven. However, safety concerns remain about both the compost and the liquid "tea". Compost worms do no eat parasitic helminth ova. Before use as fertiliser, secondary treatment of the vermifiltered effluent is required to lower biological oxygen demand (BOD), suspended solids, and helminth egg count to safe levels. The composted solids also contain high levels of helminth eggs and these remain active for some time. The compost doesn't need to sit for 20+ years, but to be safe it does need to sit for long enough to deactivate all helminth eggs. I'd suggest 3 years "safe containment" would give assurance that this is the case... 5 years at the most.

Sufficient volume in the domestic waste vermicomposter is required to remain operational without removal of solids for 5 years. I have found a chamber volume of 1 m3 to be sufficient for an average family, taking into account seasonal fluctuations with the worms. The twin-chamber design, each of 1m3 therefore allows each side to rest for 5 years before removal of compost. This is all very straight forward and most suitable for primary decentralised treatment in developing countries. There really is no need for proprietary technologies, just local knowledge and access to materials.

What does need further work is on simple secondary treatment systems suitable for developing countries that offers significant and consistent reductions in helminth counts in the liquid effluent so this could be used safely for crop fertigation.

Nutrition is variety of the main building blocks hydrogen, oygen, carbon, phosphorous and potasium BUT chemical agriculture has overlooked the importance of the micro-nutrients that delivers fragrance, taste and broad spectrum nutrition which is crucial for many health related factors. For exampel if we feed our growing veggies only chemical fertilizer we soon deplete our soils of the micro-nutrients and we get what the food industry asked for: only visual gratification of bright colors and size XL ... thats what a supermarket toamto delivers ... no fragrance, no taste (at best) and we do not get the crucial effect of our food serving our body with the effect of knowing when we had enough. You can eat 20 supermarket market tomates without getting a nicely full feeling that we get after having had 1-2 great organic tomatos, grown in rich organic soil with plenty of humus.
Consider this: the US was first out using chemical fertilizer on a massive scale and the US also dons the, without comparison, largest population of obese people in the world ... coincidence ? I don't think so. If we don't feel full from what we eat we keep eating , hoping that quantity with deliver what quality did not give us. The human feces and animal excreta contains a fair amount of those micronutrients and this is one reason for extracting the human excreta in a chemically clean form and feed our plants with it, once processed.
This is the reason for the new strategy of www.smarttoilet.se ... we need those micronutrients contained in the fecal excreta and we can get in a clean form when we don't mix our excretion with large amounts of water and then mixing it further with sewage !
Try the easy-to-read flip-chart of www,smarttoilet.se and see why the new tech of dry toilets make so much sense.

Dear Carl,

Thanks for your posting.

If I understand your response well, the CompostEra environment is not optimal for ‘happy’ worms, which otherwise would require more service and maintenance inputs (I add) ‘by observing/ensuring appropriate temperature, moisture, acidity, and ventilation’.

In the CompostEra the worms ‘survive somehow’ and contribute to the composting process ‘somehow’ (otherwise you could save the extra expenses of adding them) but the process is not ‘almost perfect’ vermi-composting (as I believed) but surprises you by ‘a quite complex web of various micro- and macro- organisms participating in the breakdown of organic substance’ which can be kickstarted by adding ‘a bucket of warm water in the spring’.

That is good to know and we will now make our own experiments whether the worms will survive and contribute also in a similar environment in an earth pit which will be fed with human excreta through pour flush (i.e. little water, max 4L per flush) and where the fluids will percolate away through the soil and where soil microbes will assist our worms in the breakdown of the excreta.

If the worms do not survive it really does not matter as our system of two alternating pits does not depend on the worms… they could just extent the emptying cycle and produce probably better quality ‘pit humus’.

… and I will not ask you again for your customers’ names..

Ciao
Hajo

Dear Hajo,
I agree that a happy worm is very useful in processing toilet residue but if we designed a toilet system to optimize for worms, we automatically add serious service and maintenance and we couldn't offer systems to the variety of situations that we do now. I will also say that the curves offered to represent how process proceeds are conceptual ... the actual breakdown is much less tidy but I'm myself surprized how the job long term handles itself quite well, and if we have one recommendation how to kickstart a sluggish process, it would be to add a bucket of warm water in the spring ... dryness is no friend of most contributors.
If you want testamonials, I cannot give my customers name away and if anonymous, the worth is near zero
All the best
Carl

Dear Carl,

I fully agree with you that composting ‘is a quite complex web of various micro- and macro- organisms participating in the breakdown of organic substance’.

Maybe it is ‘nit-picking’ but I would call it only ‘vermi-composting’ if worms contribute to the process (at least something if not considerable). But they will only do so if they are ‘happy’ which I am still not sure whether the CompostEra will provide the right environment for.

You may still try to convince me otherwise and in order not to violate your customers’ privacy you may send my email to them and they can contact me if they like so (hajoschaeferatgmx.de).

In a discussion today with some Tanzanian colleagues about sanitation options for Tanzanian peri-/urban areas, we found one interesting solution which can somehow be blended with vermi-composting: the pour flush toilet with twin pits. You find details in the EAWAG ‘Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies, 2nd Edition’, page 68, collection and storage S6. With a diameter of 1m and a depth of 2m, the volume should last for 3 years when used by 10 people.

Our idea is to add composting worms to the pit in use. The conditions in the pit may be very similar to those in a CompostEra. If they are happy, they will contribute to shrinkage and eventually to extension of the useful time of one pit and also to a better quality of the compost. If they do not survive, the system will at least continue functioning as designed in the Compendium (we will build two pits).

Because the twin pits will not work in impermeable soils, in rock and in high GW table, we ‘developed’ the following alternative idea: we will dig in 2m3 PE tanks which will have a false floor on which the solids will accumulate and below the fluids (pour flush water and urine). The fluids will have to be pumped out (handpump or sucking with motorised pump) once a week and be disposed of in the central Waste Stabilization Ponds. Then we have almost the CompostEra made of local material and adapted to our conditions. Thanks for your inputs.

If we are lucky we produce good compost, if not we have at least an improved, sustainable sanitation system for which we can hope to develop also a sustainable service chain and we can get away from the troublesome pit latrines.

I am not so happy that we still use flush water although very low quantity but the pour flush also has advantages as the gooseneck in the squat plat prevents the dumping of solid waste in the pit which currently is a big obstacle when trying to empty a latrine pit. Further we can try to install low flush equipment which makes possibly use of the hand-washing water.

I invite you and everybody to comment on our ideas.

Ciao
Hajo

Buenos Dias Hajo,

I am in Manual Antonio Costa Rica now installing an ozone injection laundry greywater treatment and recycling system at the Costa Verde Hotel to help reduce the need for energy for hot water, water consumption and the use of chemicals (soap) by massive percentages.

My use of ozone has now increased from utilizing it in disinfection and the breakdown of organics in the greywater for total recycling to potable water qualities to my company's newly established laundry division. Ozone is truly amazing but there are some issues especially in humid countries such as Costa Rica. I am utilizing DeltaWash ozone and air drier technologies and they are responding very effectively to the humidity.

Regarding composting of human excrement, I totally agree with Carl that Mother Nature has an army of organisms and more magic other than worms in naturally converting human excrement and kitchen organics into usable soil amendments. Aristotle called worms "The intestines of the Universe" and I, as well as Carl believe that composting can be accomplished without them, but with them and the correct composting mixture, Mother Nature can use ALL of the tools in her tool box.

From my HANDS ON composting experiences worms require a varied diet, which HAS to include kitchen organics. Just trying to get worms to eat toilet resources makes for a very unhappy worm.

I think I have tried to promote the concept that if you are actually going to try to shrink, reduce, compost, treat or whatever you want to call dealing with human excrement you need to have;
1. An acceptable toilet with a transportation system.
2. A vessel capable of providing the MUCH needed oxygen to all critters, including worms throughout the composting mass, not just on the side walls or on the top surface.
3. A bulking/carbon source
4. A method of soil amendment, liquid and solid, removal.

It is time to go for the morning 2 Kilometer swim around the ocean rocks.

Talk to you later.

Clint