New documents, still in French are also available...
For Dry toilets renters, for organizers and for users!

Regards,

Please find the document Florent is talking about in attachment.
It consists in Guidelines or Code of conduct to enhance good practices for dry toilets management in large public events such as music festivals and others. The document is in French. Kindly note that this document dates back from 2012 given that dry toilets have been used for many years in public events in France and the RAE (French ecological sanitation network) has done great efforts to set up standards and support service providers to deliver a high quality service.
As a result, dry toilets, even in major events, are more often than not cleaner and more comfortable to use than chemical toilets.

Best regards,

Cécile

Bonjour à tous,
en France l'étude que nous avons mené s'est terminé l'an passé (2017) par la publication de plaquettes à destination des prestataires de toilettes sèches mobiles, des organisateurs de festivals et des usagers.
Le tout est téléchargeable gratuitement en Français ici: www.rae-intestinale.fr/
De mémoire Nowato voulait faire la traduction en allemand.

Nous avons malheureusement pas encore eu d'évolution réglementaire. Pour les matières les solutions envisagées sont:
- compostage chez les prestataires ou des agriculteurs par une personne compétente justifiant d'une formation de maitre composteur.
- mélange dans une plateforme de compostage normalisée

Nous œuvrons encore à l'évolution réglementaire.
Tus

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Hello everyone,
in France from 2017 on the made was completed last year (2017) on the publication of plaquettes to destination mobile dry toilet providers, festival organizers and users.
The whole thing can be downloaded for free in English here: www.rae-intestinale.fr/
From memory now wanted to be translated into German.

Unfortunately, we have not yet had any regulatory developments. For the materials the solutions envisaged are:
- composting at the farmer's or farmer's premises by a competent person justifying a master composter training.
- mixing in a standardized composting platform

We are still working on regulatory developments.
Tus

Hi Seamus,

That sounds interesting. Could you tell us more about your design and experiences? Any information would be appreciated such as photos, costs, user experiences, maintenance issues, fee structure, type of festivals where it could be used?
We could also start a separate thread for your design where you could post updates in future, if you like.

Edit: Seamus has now started a separate thread here: forum.susana.org/34-urine-diversion-syst...for-temporary-events

Regards,
Elisabeth

Jurgen,
I just did a project on this and came up with a sixteen unit UDDT which could be set up in a few hours and then taking off site and emptied without using shovels etc.
Could be moved to next site within a few hours.
Will you get back to me if you have an interest in this.

Hello,

I want to give a quick update and answer the questions above.

First of all, there is a great article about the German market for sustainable festival toilets published at the 5th Dry Toilet Conference by Roach et al. :

www.susana.org/_resources/documents/defa...323-7-1458726148.pdf

That article might answer a couple of questions, however the sectors development is moving very quickly. The numbers are not correctly anymore and for example EcoToiletten has today around 300 composting toilets available and we fully covered the Feel Festival with 18.000 visitors on four days with 180 toilets. It is hard to tell what market share the companies altogether have, but it will be no more than 5%.

The companies (that I am aware of) are listed in the article. If one might also include the german speaking part of Switzerland, than there is also Kompotoi in Zurich. All of us are frequently in contact and meet at least once a year. No mergers happen so far and competition is fairly low. Everyone has the goal to promote sustainable sanitation in their own fashion.

We dispose the material usually to regular composting plants with the waste code "AVV 200399". But in a few regions only MBT plants are available. Also a few biogas plants take the material. However, waste water treatment plants are not an option for the solid residuals, because it would disorder the processes.

The supplier of chemical toilets dispose the material directly into municipal waste water plants. However the material need the be diluted with water by a factor of 20 (see attachted file from the Bavarian ministry for hydrology). Smaller treatment plants are unable to process that load in a short period. Therefore at larger events in rural areas the supplier of chemical toilets need to approach more WWTPs.

@Florent. Please keep us updated of the developments on the French market.

Best
Kevin

Bonjour Kevin,
je suis ravi de voir que ça évolue bien en Allemagne. Nous sommes toujours en train de travailler sur une étude scientifique de caractérisation des impacts des filières de traitement pour les toilettes sèches mobiles évènementiels en France. Ainsi, je suis preneur du ou des textes de loi allemand qui spécifient la légalité de disposer des résidus solides (sciure de bois, du papier toilette et des matières fécales) comme les déchets municipaux dans un MBT usine.
Merci de ton retour.
A+
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Hello Kevin ,
I am delighted to see that it is evolving well in Germany. We are still working on a scientific study to characterize the impact of treatment processes for mobile event- dry toilets in France . So, I am taker or German laws that specify the law to dispose of solid waste (sawdust , toilet paper and faeces ) such as municipal waste in an MBT plant .
Thank you for your return.
A +

Dear Kevin,

Thanks for this update, much appreciated!

A couple of small questions. You said:

In the last year the communication between the different companies got better and with that also knowledge sharing.

Who are these companies or how many of them are there? How do you overcome the issue that you're also competitors? Have there perhaps been any mergers?

And you said:

However, it also leads to competitive disadvantages against suppliers of chemical toilets

How do they dispose of their collected waste? Can they dump it at any municipal wastewater treatment plant without any problems? They also have to pay a fee, right?

What is your share of the market now for these festivals in Germany, i.e. can you estimate what % of festival users in Germany can now use composting toilets instead of chemical toilets? Is it around 0.1 %, 1% or perhaps even 10%? I am curious.

Kind regards,
Elisabeth

I want to give a quick update about one progress in mobile sustainable sanitation in Germany.

In the last year the communication between the different companies got better and with that also knowledge sharing. Apart from seeing everyone become more professional in all aspects, I want to share the development regarding the disposal of the collected feces and urine.

In the past years there were no legal ways for proper treatment/composting for the residuals. Therefore we started our activities by storing the material. At that point the quantities were very low and unproblematic.

However, as the market demand for composting toilets in festivals increases, every player in the field needed to come up with a legal and scalable solution. Through intense research and lobbying at the different stakeholders in the waste spectrum (administration, unions, collectors, composting sites) there is now a solution.

It is legal to dispose the solid residuals (sawdust, toilet paper and feces) as municipal waste in a MBT plant (Mechanical - Biological - Treatment plant) if you can declare your material as waste. At these facilities the material gets either composted or incinerated. The composted material will usually be used for non-food applications as i.e. parks.

With that way of disposal there are also a couple of downsides:

1) It is not totally transparent what is happening with the material, if it gets composted or incinerated. We rely only on oral statements by the facility staff.

2) The material needs to contain very little fluids. This requires a filtering of liquids and solid matter before disposal, which is an extra process and coupled with technical complexity. Especially in public toilets the share of liquids is higher than on private toilets. The liquids need to go into the waste water treatment plant, which produces higher costs and the valuable urine can´get reused.

3) The costs for disposal are quite high. Prices range currently between 160€/t - 260€/t. Additionally a container needs to be ordered to transport the material from the festival site to the composting facility, which produces extra costs of 90€ - 160€ .

4) A few of the facilities still refuse to take the material and the number of facilities is limited in a region. The reasons for refusal are usually fear and lack of knowledge. This leads in such scenario to higher distances and with that to higher costs and unnecessary truck emissions.


We are happy to have a first solution. However, it also leads to competitive disadvantages against suppliers of chemical toilets. We at EcoToiletten (and I suppose every other player in Germany agrees) wish more support from local administrations and composting facility to solve the problems described above. Especially by having the chance to dispose the material in every composting site without special treatment permissions (which are vastly available) the financial disadvantages would decrease. Also administrative support through sharing of knowledge would help to reduce concerns about the material.

I felt that sharing this development might be helpful for one or another. Hopefully in the future we will receive money from the disposal instead of bearing the costs of it

Kevin

[Start of Page 3 of the discussion]

We are now very ready to go to supply up to 1200 loos into the german festival market.. So it is now not a problem regarding supplying events with how ever many they need. We are really looking forward to hearing from different people and businesses who may be interested in using the Natural Event loos and systems in a franchised system where everything is supplied.. lets talk some time!

Hey everybody,

I just saw this topic recently and think I should also introduce my company for composting toilets for festivals.

We are EcoToiletten (German for Ecotoilets) and are based in Berlin. We started in 2013 and did 50 Events in our area so far and gained a lot of experience from that. www.ecotoiletten.de. We see a great potential in Germany for composting toilets, because most of the users are very much aware of the "green" topics. Also the user feedback was very good.

But there are some drawbacks or barriers at the moment here in Germany:

1) is that the system is fairly new for everyone, since rentals are just up for 2-3 years.
2) all the companies are still very small and can´t fully supply bigger events
3) the competition with conventional toilets is very though, especially for construction sites (which is actually the largest market for Dixi and Co.)
4) there is insufficient regulation about treatment of feaces and administrations are very risk averse or unaware of secure treatment methods
5) lack of capital for those small market players

@Florent: It is good to see, that the scene in France is well-connected. Actually in Germany we are also about to improve our network throughout all the companies. The aim needs to be to prove the benefits of the concept of ecological toilets and to increase the volume of feacal matter. It´s good to hear, that natural event was successful with that plan and convinced the EPA in UK. Something similar should be possible here in Germany.

I also wrote a blogpost on Jürgens Website, Saniblog, at the beginning of the year about portable toilets in Germany.


Kevin

Hello Every body,

I just would like to inform you that the annual meeting of mobil dry toilets renters which are RAE's members will take place in october (10/11/12) in south of france.

This is the "Réseau de l'Assainissement Ecologique" annual meeting which regroup around 20 mobil dry toilets renters engage in an durable and ecological by-products management.

So, some partners from belgium and switzerland join us every year and we would like to share more and more french experience about our practices.

you are welcome to join us even if our english speaking is not very easy.

You will find enclose the program of this week-end.

cheers!