Do compost toilets work in both hot and cold climates?

WooWoo has supplied and installed waterless toilets across the UK and works with manufacturers that have experience in all conditions, from National Parks in Iceland to hot deserts in Australia.

As mentioned in other FAQs, and explored throughout our podcast series, some of our waterless toilets are compost toilets – essentially collection units for later composting (away from the toilet), whilst some are composting toilets – in other words, the composting is taking place within the toilet itself.

With a compost toilet (ie not composting within the toilet), the temperature will not affect the toilet in any way. When the contents are transferred to the composting bin (or whatever container or system you are running), then the ambient temperature will have an affect on the speed of composting.

Below around 7ºC composting will naturally come to a halt because it’s too cold for the composting bacteria to do their work. With a large enough mass of material, composting could carry on, but in most cases (apart from commercial scale composting operations), there simply isn’t sufficient bulk of material to allow this to happen.

The ventilation systems will still work in all temperatures, taking odours away, but the raw material will sit there, waiting for the temperature to rise, at which point, everything starts again.

Find more information on composting in our ‘the composting process‘ page and also in this blog post.