Our island home didn’t have indoor plumbing when it was built in 1914. I don’t even have a guess as to where the outhouse was. Some time around 1930, however, a kitchen and bathroom were added to the house and a cesspool was dug to handle the wastewater.
In the history to which I have access, going back to the early 1990s, the cesspool hasn’t ever been serviced. I do know that the former owner lived here for 30 years, much of it with his wife and four daughters, and said the sewage system never gave him trouble. That’s fine, but I treat the cesspool with a great deal of respect.
When I plumbed the studio, I wanted a flush toilet. I built a vermicomposting system. My design is similar, but self-contained so the environment is never directly exposed to the sewage. That means it will have to be serviced (compost removed) more often, but it meets the spirit if not the letter of local laws and it will only see occasional use. But it is likely even more sensitive to contamination.
Most folks in first-world countries are used to toilets that connect to municipal sewage systems that rely on large, complex chemical, biological, and mechanical processes to render the sewage into large volumes of effluent that are then discharged into oceans and rivers. People get used to being able to flush all kinds of things that don’t really belong in sewer systems and, remarkably, most municipal systems handle this well (though the operators will tell you it can cause a lot of trouble). My century-old cesspool and delicately balanced worm tank aren’t so forgiving.
So how does one talk to visitors about what they can and cannot flush, when they’re used to dumping everything from dead goldfish to drugs to chlorine bleach to hygiene products down the drain? People like their bathroom rituals and don’t like to change them. Nor do they like to talk about them.
I decided to keep the message simple (no long lists of do’s and don’ts) and positive (what you can do, not what’s prohibited). We’ll see if “flush only pee, poo, and our TP ~mahalo~” gets the message across.
—2p