Waste Matters: Compost, Domestic Practice, and the Transformation of Alternative Toilet Cultures around Skaneateles Lake, New York

Abstract

The Skaneateles Lake Watershed Composting Toilet Project highlights the material and sociocultural challenges of developing new kinds of embodied practices that effectively utilize alternatives to traditional water-dependent plumbing. Practical, small-scale innovation is important to addressing the human dimensions of these changes, particularly given the widely held taboos informing discussion of what happens behind closed bathroom doors. In this example an innovative watershed policy placed composting toilets in seventy-five lakeside homes to prevent household blackwater from polluting an unfiltered drinking water source utilized by 250 000 people. Interviews with key informants and participating households illustrate the ways in which expectations of toileting practice sit in tension with the need to preserve the health of the local watershed, particularly over the long term. Understanding shifts in toileting practice must move past functional assessments of new or untested technology, taking into account sociocultural understandings of private, deeply embodied, yet resolutely pragmatic daily habits. As individuals seek to normalize new toilet technology as a part of daily routines, they encounter the body's materiality in ways that conflict with expectations of what belongs inside the home. In this case, the traditionally excluded effluence of the human body remains too close for comfort, forcing a renegotiation of the common boundary-making habits defining domestic space. The result is a shift in expectations about what of the body can or should belong in the home.

Extending traditional water supplies in inland communities with nontraditional solutions to water scarcity

“…There is also the question of who would be responsible for maintaining alternative toilets in a community, as there would be a danger of incorrect use and potential problems related to upkeep and disposal of product. An industry could develop around servicing such toilets, and that would add costs for the owner, which must be considered (Dimpfl & Moran, 2014). Public perception and acceptance of alternative toilets would need to be studied, too.…”

The Anthropocene stinks! Odor, affect, and the entangled politics of livestock waste in a rural Iowa watershed

“…Efforts to contain an abject material like hog waste, including through efforts to commoditize it as manure, can be understood as work to maintain the subjectivity of livestock producers and farmers as modern, and those who oppose modern farming methods as outsiders. These efforts entangle the intimate spaces of the home with the abject matter and the state’s efforts to regulate through technological regimes, thus the blurred boundaries mess up who and what becomes abject (Dimpfl and Moran, 2014: 735). Waste, fortunately, can never fully realize its potential as capital, because something of its abject materiality is always retained (Gidwani, 2013: 781).…”

Illuminating elimination: public perception and the production of potable water reuse

“…78,79 Nevertheless, dry sanitation faces several significant programmatic and operational challenges, and the viability of large-scale dry sanitation systems is currently unknown. 76,80,81 One of the fundamental governance components of dry sanitation systems is their decentralization. Primary treatment of pathogens can occur within the toilet unit, and secondary processing can occur within the community if necessary.…”

“…The EcoSan perspective disrupts the common sense of water‐based sewage systems, but it has proven effective in both industrialized and developing countries . Nevertheless, dry sanitation faces several significant programmatic and operational challenges, and the viability of large‐scale dry sanitation systems is currently unknown …”

“…The toilet is an unsustainable and ‘illogical form of sanitation’ according to Teh et al, and yet, at the moment, there are few commercially available alternative technologies (Ref , p. 335). For example, composing toilets are ‘known to be a challenging technology’ in communities where they are applied (Ref , p. 728). Urban density poses additional barriers for managing dry sanitation systems, as do habits, customs, and inexperience .…”