At the University of British Columbia, researchers are asking the tough questions. Questions like, “What if mushrooms could eat your poop to become part of a lush botanical garden?”
And thus, the researchers created the MycoToilet: a cedar-clad, mushroom-powered, composting toilet that aims to eliminate water from the equation. What a time to be alive.
The MycoToilet is tucked into the trees at UBC’s Botanical Garden, complete with a green roof, skylight, and a ramp for wheelchair accessibility. But the real magic happens underneath your bottom.
Inside the toilet bowl lies mycelium, the root network of fungi, which goes to work breaking down your poop, absorbing 90 percent of the stink, and breaking it down into compost.
Of course, you can also pee in it. Liquid waste is separated and turned into fertilizer. The whole setup needs maintenance just four times a year and produces about 600 liters of compost and 2,000 liters of liquid plant fertilizer annually.
This Experimental Waterless Toilet Uses Mushrooms To Eat Your Poop
Speaking with the CBC, Joseph Dahmen, an architecture professor and lead on the project, calls it a way to “recontextualize an activity that we often take for granted and do without thinking, to kind of put it in a new light and suggest that a waste-separating toilet doesn’t have to be a kind of sacrifice to use.”
In other words, pooping doesn’t have to be wasteful. Dahmen even went as far as to describe the experience of using the toilet as a “Scandinavian sauna experience,” according to the CBC. That’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about a composting toilet.
Microbiologist Steven Hallam sees the toilet as a “living laboratory.” They’re using DNA barcoding and other science-y wizardry to track how different fungi perform. If you use the toilet, you’re technically participating in a science experiment that could one day revolutionize the toilet industry.
Congrats on your new research career. Don’t forget to wipe.
The grander scale vision for the project involves putting these waterless mushroom-powered toilets in underdeveloped communities where sustainable decentralized solutions aren’t available.
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