Waste management in apartments

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MyDailyMistake@reddit

I suspect in metro’s first victim will be the parking lots.

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mediocre_remnants@reddit

I wouldn't be shitting inside my home if there was no plumbing. Or maybe I'd go old-school and use a chamber pot, but I'd be dumping that outside ASAP.

People lived in apartments before indoor plumbing existed. They managed things just fine. They pissed and shit in chamber pots then dumped them out the window onto unsuspecting passers-by.

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No-Language6720@reddit

Well I wouldn't say just 'just fine' exactly. Why do you think the plague spread rapidly in Europe? Wasn't exactly the cleanest areas in cities with them dumping chamber pots outside windows...

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ErinRedWolf@reddit

Dump it “outside” – where? That could become untenable very quickly if everyone is dumping their waste right outside the apartments.

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voiderest@reddit

It was. London had open sewers at one point. Literal shit show.

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Historical_Course587@reddit

They managed things just fine.

TBF they died constantly of preventable hygeine-related disease in those times.

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capinredbeard22@reddit

I don’t think you have to dump it on passersby per se (but it is definitely more fun) 🤣

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carbinatedmilk@reddit

Ah there’s nothing quite like taking a stroll down the street with your baby in the carriage, to see a window above you open up, and a barrage of somebody’s morning coffee shit fill your vision.

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I mean, as long as you have access to water, flushing will still work. You just have a bucket of water next to the toilet and flush with that, or just pour the water into the tank if that feels better. Of course, moving buckets of water up ten floors is a bit much, but that depends on if you have running water in the taps. How common is it for water to just disappear for days in a civilised country?

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YourMomsCrackDealer@reddit

I drunkenly peed in my cat's litterbox when I was a stupid shithead teenager. The sheer quantity of urine rendered the litter largely ineffective.

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Historical_Course587@reddit

I'm gonna argue that waste management in an apartment or urban scenario is untenable, and one of the central reasons why bugging-in to an apartment is a bad idea. Obviously without water you do not want to be attempting to use your regular toilet/bathroom/drains. You really don't want waste inside at all, but if you had to do it indoors the solution would be into a water-tight garbage bag.

However, you do not live in a vacuum. You have neighbors above, below, and all around you. Do you expect them to be on top of waste in the same manner? I wouldn't bet on it. You will have neighbors who destroy their toilets to get to the drain pipe, neighbors who middle-ages-style dump a bucket o' shit over their balcony rail and not care, and lots of people who merely step outside and find themselves a pee corner. From a health and safety standpoint, your waste isn't the problem. Their issues will be, along with drain catches drying out and becoming noxious gas dispensers and the potential for anyone above/below you to make your life miserable if not outright kill you with disease.

Best-case scenario - everyone else moves out, going somewhere else to ride out this emergency. That means you live in an abandoned building, with lots of bugs and rodents and transient looters. Your food supplies are at much greater risk. Your waste disposal, if not discrete, will be a big brightly-lit sign that says "Somebody Lives Here!" for everyone to see/smell. It makes you very much a target. Especially as days turn into weeks and fresh waste is a sign that someone has figured out how to survive right in that area.

So bare minimum:

You need a plan to deal with the hazardous waste of neighbors being right outside your door/windows, and potentially backing up into your apartment drains and fixtures.
You need a disposal plan for your waste that puts it away from your domicile.

There's no good answer in an apartment setting. It's just a bad place to hunker down.

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Mean-Advertising7098@reddit

TBH I think the point is whether those human feces and urine could be dealt well. Even with the cat litter the smell and possible illness those contain is still a problem for apartments.

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No-Language6720@reddit

Assuming you have a working storm system and the drainage is working without backing up you can use grey water to flush toilets still. Just because you don't have water didn't mean the storm systems aren't working

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ladymorgahnna@reddit

You can get a camping toilet that comes with a packet that goes in the toilet to keep smell down. So you’d pour a few bottles of water in the bucket for the addition of the smell blocker. It’s not a long-term solution obviously.

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PleasantAnimator7741@reddit

Consider a sawdust bucket toilet. Litter boxes use heavy clay to keep down tracking. Something you won’t worry about as a human. You can remove the dry waste easily in a garbage bag and or compost it. (Cue arguments about human feces in compost)

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gogozrx@reddit

"night dirt"

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PleasantAnimator7741@reddit

Yeah, the concept of night soil is lost on many westerners, however to be fair our diets are not what they were a hundred years ago.

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gogozrx@reddit

Also, it requires composting before use

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DueScreen7143@reddit

You can still flush a toilet, you literally just need to pour a bucket of water directly into the bowl and it will flush.

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ErinRedWolf@reddit

Can you safely do this even if municipal water is off for weeks?

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DueScreen7143@reddit

As far as I'm aware yes, the pipes will be dry but it's not like sewage pipes are full of flowing liquid 100% of the time anyway.

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Winter_Owl6097@reddit

Garbage bags inside a five gallon bucket. Amazon has compost able bags too.

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SelectCase@reddit

Use the dog strategy and go outside. Just make sure to bury the feces.

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No_Character_5315@reddit

Tbf if op has water it's really a short term problem how much water could they store in a apartment maybe a month's worth if it's a larger place. If they are that worried get a composting toilet of some sort that should work for a month.

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UnionCorrect9095@reddit

Could try burning it all. This will eliminate the possibility of the spread of bacteria.

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trying3216@reddit

Toilets require no power to operate. Waste will go down if you pour the right amount of water or any liquid over it. Even more urine cam be used to flush urine.

You can fill any plastic jug and throw it away.

You can also use plastic bags. The kitty litter or sawdust or earth or whatever is optional but it makes it easier to use a bag more than once.

If you can go outside you can deposit it in a convenient place and cover.

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Eredani@reddit

Bedside commode or 5-gallon bucket with a toilet seat. Lots of small trash bags. Just bag up your stuff ASAP.

This can work in the short term... maybe 30 days in a pinch.

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FletchWazzle@reddit

Get a food grade dehydrater for number two deposit the liquid in your sink unless you have a bunch of house plants which you can feed 50/50 mixed with water

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Digital_Simian@reddit

What kitty litter does is basically mask odors and absorb liquid to make handling the waste easier. For a person, you'd need a lot of litter to do that. Your bladder is a lot larger than a cats.

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SonsOfValhallaGaming@reddit

Procurring enough cat litter to feasibly take care of even just a single humans waste management needs would be quite a task. Considering that also, litter is only viable for cats because you can scoop and dispose of the waste. You dont fill up a cat box and never handle the mess after, and that would be doubly or even triply so for human waste. So either way, you'd need a place to store and or dispose of the waste, which is basically wasted energy and effort as far as litter use goes.

Best methods would be to have a designated area that you would simply go out, do your business and cover it or bury it. One of the biggest overlooked things about SHTF scenarios is indoor plumbing and toilets basically being useless relatively quickly. The amount of people who would start losing their minds realizing they have to dig a small hole to piss and shit in, and then they'd have to have something to wipe with that wasn't toilet paper or wipes would be incredible. A return to the primitive will quickly weed out a lot of people

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hudsoncress@reddit

no. five gallon bucket, rig a toilet seat on top, use a plastic bag for pooping, tye it off and throw it at your neighbors to maintain tactical superiority in the Hunger Games (they will die of dysentery and you can take their things). You can also just pee down the drain, or save it, concentrate it, and use the urea to manufacture explosives, cleaning products, or fertilizer. Option two is go back to the historical standard of chamber pots and emptying them into the open sewers that run beside the streets.

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infinitum3d@reddit

Guardyloo!

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infinitum3d@reddit

Diaper genie.

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Casiarius@reddit

I will agree with everyone who recommends separating liquids and solids. If you look up the two-bucket toilet system you can see how this works. Solid waste that has been made extra dry with absorbent material is reasonably inoffensive. I have a couple bags of pellet stove fuel stored for this purpose. The fuel pellets are really just sawdust that has been compressed into pellets. You can use them straight from the bag, but if you get them wet and then dry them back out again you will have ordinary sawdust which is ideal for this purpose.

https://www.phlush.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Twin-Bucket-Leaflet.pdf

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Ryan_e3p@reddit

I would definitely not be living in a place where I had to utilize cat litter for human waste. If it gets to that point, I'm either going to be spending a lot more time at the gym, or I'm bugging out to a friend or relative's house.

The health hazards that come along with a prolonged water shortage and living in a confined area are simply not worth the risk. Once it hits day 2 of not being able to shower, wash hands, drink, clean, and remove bodily waste, you should consider moving to greener pastures not fertilized with human poop.

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Cute-Consequence-184@reddit

No, not usually.

It has been used short term because it was readily available and easy to transport by helicopters and emergency personnel.

What you need is a brick of compressed pine shavings.

Pine shavings absorb liquids and smell. It also doesn't compress much when wet.

Cat litter gets heavy so it must be changed often. The pine isn't heavy and helps much better with the smell.

I would advise using a urinal or buying a bucket seat with a urine diverter or just make one. But using a separate urinal is just as easy and usually cheaper.

It is the urine that smells, not the poo. So dump the urine down the toilet or bathtub.

I use a double bag system. A heavy duty contractor's bag goes into the bucket first. I then use a compostable poo bag inside the contractor's bag, then the seat goes on top. When it is time to pull the bag, I pull both, tying off the compostable bag and use the contractors bag to carry it to where it will be dumped. If the compostable bag didn't leak, I reuse the contractor's bag.

RV people use this system all the time.

But you really need 2 buckets as the pine shavings will need their own bucket once opened. They can stack together until used.

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ryan112ryan@reddit

Having lived off grid with a composting toilet for a decade, here is what I've learned:

The biggest thing is to separate your liquids from your solids. Urine should be collected and can be dumped down a drain or in a landscape bed, but you'll wanna rotate so you don't build up a smell.

Separating liquids is easier for men, so you'll have to consider a urine diverter for women.

Solids is really a matter of a 5 gallon bucket, a lugable loo 5 gallon seat, and a bunch of trash bags. Your cover material can really be anything, if you're going to fully compost it then it matters, but I just used hamster bedding or leaves. I found a good container for that is a charcoal briquet storage container, it has a snap on lid that has a big opening, worked really well for me.

Depending on how many people you could have a setup for each person if you want. I used standard kitchen trash bags from Costco, they're like $20 for 200 of them. You can change it out as often as you like. The trick then becomes where to put them. You want to have a designated place away from water, down wind, and out of sight.

The big thing you want to think about is your neighbors. Depending on the apartment size, you could stock buckets, bags and lids for each unit, then designate spots for disposal of bags. That way you manage the waste for everyone, they have the tools to do it, etc. Bags are $20, lid seats are $15, bucket is $5, so for $40 you can outfit each unit. If nothing comes to pass, you can always use the buckets and the bags.

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TacTurtle@reddit

You would probably need to set up a community latrine / outhouse.

The military way was to cut a 55 gallon drum in half and put a board over the top with a hole in it, then periodically burn out the waste or dump in in a larger refuse area where it would be covered with crushed lime to keep the smell down.

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