As there are already many sufficiently working modular mobile toilet systems, BioBreak is a new bottom unit designed to extend such existing systems to make a quick impact and leverage the fact, that mobile toilets work waterless and therefore save up to 10l per flush and toilet use. The re-designed bottom unit consists of 3 parts: the tank, the floor plate, and the toilet bowl. The toilet bowl, using a wall element, ensures the separation of solid and liquid waste, which are stored in two different compartments within the tank unit. The floor plate serves as the connecting interface between all elements of the mobile toilet. The proposed elements are designed to separate and store the liquid from the solid parts of the human waste to be easily extracted as two different resources. In this way, the very nutritious and rapidly degrading urine can be quickly returned to the fertilizing process, while the solid faeces have more time to be composted before being used. As the contact between urine and faeces causes a lot of inconvenient smells, the separation has the positive side effect of getting rid of a big amount of it, while the rest of the construction is modelled after existing modular typologies on the market.
Overview of the issue and your approach: As of today, big parts of agriculture are being fertilized by chemical products like commercial nitrogen fertilizer. As these are obtained from natural gas deposits, they constitute another example of a depletable resource we are exploiting and therefore burdening future generations. Next to being subjected to high price fluctuations due to the cost of natural gas, becoming reliant onto these makes us very fragile. Renowned author of global farming issues Gene Logsdon makes the call in his book „Holy Shit - managing manure to save mankind“ that „the end of cheap chemical fertilizer would be almost as earth-shaking as a nuclear bomb explosion.“ He also makes the point that despite the past 100 years in which we got hung up on chemical products, civilization treated human waste to be more precious than gold, as it was (together with animal waste) the primary resource to maintain soil fertility and therefore crucial in food production. As redesigning whole sewage systems is simply unrealistic, we are seeing potential in applications in which human waste is already being collected, such as mobile toilets. There are already numerous well working modular toilet systems, hence we chose to design a specific bottom unit to extend such systems, that separates liquid from solid waste in sufficiently big containers in a low-tech manner. By doing this, we ensure a separated extraction and therefore ease the reintroduction of the waste for agricultural incentives or the production of biogas, while lowering the smell within the cabin.
The essence of your solution: New floor unit for existing mobile toilet systems that separate liquid from solid human waste to reuse these as natural fertilizers for agriculture and as a resource for generating biogas.
The stakeholders in your project: The main stakeholder is the toilet company that produces, maintains and delivers the units. The redesign of the bottom element merely changes the height of the mobile toilet cabin, the same amount of toilet units can be delivered per truck. An external sewage and cleaning provider takes care of emptying the toilets, requiring one more step, since the liquid and solid waste need to be extracted individually, which are reused by local agriculture or biogas plants stakeholders.
