About the Book

Essential Composting Toilets is a streamlined, illustrated manual that takes a practical approach to system selection criteria, design, installation, and operation, while meeting universal health and safety objectives.

Book Synopsis

Transform Waste into a Resource with Safe, Efficient Composting Toilets

Part of the Sustainable Building Essentials series, Essential Composting Toilets is the practical guide to designing, installing, and operating water-saving, environmentally friendly toilet systems. Learn how to turn human waste into compost while improving hygiene, reducing water use, and increasing resilience in homes or small buildings.

What You'll Learn

• Water Conservation and Cost Savings: Minimize water use and reduce reliance on septic systems or municipal sewage.


• Resource Recovery: Safely compost waste into usable soil amendments while maintaining health and safety standards.


• System Selection Made Simple: Compare composting toilet types, ventilation strategies, urine separation, and new build versus retrofit applications.


• Design, Installation, and Operation: Step-by-step guidance, drawings, and photos make planning and building your system clear and achievable.


• Professional Yet Accessible: Ideal for DIYers, homeowners, designers, consultants, and water conservation advocates.

Written by Gord and Ann Baird, award-winning permaculture designers and sustainable building experts, this guide blends research, regulation compliance, and hands-on experience to make composting toilets a viable option for any home, whether urban or rural.

Explore the full Sustainable Building Essentials series for illustrated, step-by-step guidance on natural and sustainable building systems, high-performance homes, and environmentally responsible construction.

From the Back Cover

From wastestream to mainstream, a practical guide to composting toilet systems

COMPOSTING TOILETS are a key feature for local resilience, money saving, water conservation, resource recovery, septic system replacement, and an improved bathroom experience in rural and urban buildings.

Essential Composting Toilets is a streamlined manual that takes a practical, how-to approach to composting toilet system selection, design, installation, and operation, while meeting universal health and safety objectives. Drawing from existing regulations and research, this book dispels myths and provides tools to assess various systems. It includes:

• Easily understood drawings, plans, and photos
• Coverage of all main composting toilet systems
• Selection criteria including site considerations, urine separation pros/cons, renovations/new builds, ventilation, servicing, and composting details
• Design and installation details.

Offering a professional approach accessible to DIYers, homeowners, design- ers, building consultants, water conservation advocates, and regulators, Essential Composting Toilets provides key information for redesigning toilet systems anywhere in the world.

The Bairds are pioneers in the composting toilet movement, and bring their considerable experience to bear in this useful and informative overview of the technology and its importance to a sustainable future.
-- Jason McLennan, Ashoka Fellow, founder and creator of the Living Building Challenge, and author, The Philosophy of Sustainable Design

True to form, Ann and Gord Baird once again lead on the innovation front with their informative and timely guide.
-- Eric Bonham P.Eng, Partnership for Water Sustainability in British Columbia

As a builder and manager of several humanure composting systems I can enthusiastically recommend this essential guide!
-- Darrell Frey, author, Bioshelter Market Garden and co-author, Food Forest Handbook

Their dedication to detail is astounding. All praise to the psychrophilic and mesophilic bacteria - and to the Bairds!
-- Guy Dauncey, author, Journey to the Future

A must-have for anyone wanting to create resilient closed-loop systems on their home acreage or farm.
-- Rob Avis, P.Eng, co-author, Essential Rainwater Harvesting and permaculture consultant, www.adaptivehabitat.ca

Gord Baird, BA, ARCSA AP and Ann Baird, BSc are the co-creators, designers, and builders of the award winning Eco-Sense home in Victoria, BC, the first internationally recognized Living Building Challenge petal residential project. www.eco-sense.ca.

New Society's Sustainable Building Essentials Series aims to provide the highest quality information on sustainable building methods and materials. Editors Chris Magwood and Jen Feigin have scoured the world of sustainable building to bring you the techniques and systems that deliver measureable benefits in terms of greater energy efficiency and reduced environmental impact. Written by the world's leading sustainable builders, designers, and engineers, these succinct, user-friendly handbooks are indispensable tools for any project.

About the Author

Gord Baird, BA, ARCSA AP and Ann Baird, BSc are the co-creators, designers, and builders of the award winning Eco-Sense home in Victoria, BC, Canada, the first internationally recognized Living Building Challenge petal residential project. They implemented greywater systems, rainwater harvesting, and composting toilets into North America's first legal two-story seismically engineered load-bearing cob home. Gord is Water Commissioner for the Capital Regional District's regional Water Supply Commission and Juan de Fuca Water Distribution Commission, and was a technical editor for the BC Ministry of Health's Manual of Composting Toilets and Greywater Standard Practices (2016). Ann works on regional climate action initiatives involving water, food, and energy resiliency in climate adaptation and risk management. They currently give tours of their Eco-sense permaculture homestead in Victoria, BC. www.eco-sense.ca.