Terminology and Jargon Glossary

This is a very generic term that can refer to any toilet that creates compost. Some smaller systems can be referred to as compost starter toilets, as the composting process may not have enough time to be completed. 

These are the elements of your waste that the microbes are removing and breaking down to make compost that is safe to use in your garden. Some bacteria you may have heard of include Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Salmonella, both of which live naturally in the intestines of people and animals. 

But these can cause sickness and disease so are generally best avoided!

This is what we tend to think of as an old outhouse. These toilets are a long drop into a holding tank (usually concrete) that needs to be pumped out regularly. Because there is no addition of compost material or bulking agent, this is classed as raw waste and referred to as sewage.

Sullage is a fancy word for greywater and greywater is a polite word for the wastewater from your home. The difference between greywater and blackwater is that blackwater has been contaminated and greywater has not. 

Greywater includes water from household sinks, showers, baths, and laundries but not liquid waste or excreta from toilets.

A leachate drain or evaporation trench is dug to accommodate excess liquid from the composting chamber. Any liquid that has entered the system that can’t be absorbed into the compost will evaporate under the false floor or drain away into the trench so it does not flood the compost chamber. 

We use the term leachate as this is excess liquid that has passed through the composting pile. It could also just be condensation depending on the environmental conditions. But it’s not urine (assuming you’re not using a urine diverting pedestal).

These are some of the alternatives to a flushing toilet. 

A micro flush toilet won’t have a cistern that fills with water, because it doesn’t have a large flush. The bowl will be dry and will be flushed with usually about a pint of water. 

Macerating toilets will still have a flushing mechanism, but has an additional step after the flush. That’s to break the waste down into smaller parts by basically blending it. This reduces the waste to a slurry that can go through a septic system or get pumped out. 

A vacuum toilet will usually have a small cistern built in for the flush, which acts similarly to the microflush but with an added vacuum flush function. This is achieved by having an electric pump, either in the toilet pedestal or attached externally, creating negative pressure and drawing waste through the pipes.

A large wastewater system designed to filter pathogens from blackwater. Old systems had to be pumped out but most new systems will filter the water to a quality to be reused in a garden.

These are used when flushing toilet waste is mixed with other household wastewater. It means that when you mix blackwater and greywater it is all classed as blackwater and needs to be treated as such. 

A system may utilise urine diversion to accommodate more solid waste. Small systems will separate liquid and solid waste so more can be collected when installed into limited spaces live vans. 

You may choose to use a urine diversion system if you wanted to use the urine as a fertilizer as well, but for quality compost, we don’t recommend it because the moisture and the nitrogen in urine are important factors.