Correct tag for a composting toilet

General talk Tagging general discussion
1

According to the wiki page amenity=toilets a composting toilet should be tagged as

toilets:disposal=pitlatrine + composting=yes

This does not reflect the reality, because a composting toilet has not much in common with a pit latrine except that it is a kind of toilet.

A composting toilet does not feature a pit but a box or tank, where the liquid components seep away and the solid components remain for composting. Sometimes there is a bucket or container with sawdust or wood chips for users to add a handful after every business. The box/tank has a door where from time to time the composted remains can be harvested. Such toilets are not very common yet but regularly found on national park campgrounds. They can be identified by the structure which is very much different from a pit latrine.

According to taginfo there is toilets:disposal=composting 48 times in use. I would like to add this value to the wiki page and recommend to use that one instead of pitlatrine+composting (which is merely 200 times in use, so no reason to bother about).

6 Likes
Minor issue with the presets of iD
2

The toilets:disposal tag could really use a clean up, or at least the Wiki entry.

The Wiki page discussion seems to indicate that at some point it became desirable to indicate flush vs. non-flush toilets and “pitlatrine” was chosen for the contrast, even though this is not a word. However, that was then described specifically as a “pit” which at least suggests a hole in the ground. This left the whole of non-flushing above ground items to proliferate, as they have. They tend to be odd, too.

One of these that has been added is toilets:disposal=dry_toilet, which is described as “a device dehydrates waste into dry matter” [sic] which is what you describe as composting. I do not know about English, but in American, we don’t use “dry toilet”, or at least I don’t. I would also use “composting”. There’s more “composting” uses plus it has mistakes and variations.

I am probably the most frequent user of toilets:disposal=vault, but not the only one and this one also shows some mistakes and variations. My problem is that it really isn’t a “pitlatrine”. A vault is similar to listed toilets:disposal=tank, which is “a storage tank emptied by a pumping truck. Often used for portable toilets.” The portable toilets description makes it at least seem like they are meaning something other than a vault toilet. Vault toilets are ubiquitous across the USA and Canada in National Forests and suchlike. They are permanent structures with a large vault underground that is pumped out when full while actual pits are covered over and moved to a new hole.

It’s quite possible we are both wrong to be trying to get more specific, at least from the historic standpoint. There seems to have been toilets:flushing=yes/no at one point, and surely if you only cared about that, that would have been enough. I have no idea what happened to arrive at this comment in the discussion:

You now have “toilets:disposal=pitlatrine”, and “toilets:handwashing=no” if you like. Explore building tags if the difference between wood and concrete construction is important to you. Brycenesbitt (talk) 17:40, 19 August 2013 (UTC)

Surely someone knows the history. Hopefully this was not just added to the Wiki and therefore it was. I note that there’s very little uptake of anything other than “flush” and “pitlatrine”.

1 Like
3

I have to admit that I did not read the wiki page discussion due to lack of time. I just had a look at the documented values for toilet:disposal and I’d say the values described there make sense with the exception that there is no dedicated tag for composting toilets yet.

I am not sure if toilets:disposal=dry_toilet describes a composting toilet. It could be another (more simple) type just separating liquid and solid components and store them in separate tanks which would be emptied from time to time. There is no detailed description so it is not clear whereas composting toilets are well defined and distinguishable from all other types.

What you describe as vault toilet is in fact identical to a tank toilet to my understanding.The only difference to a portable tank toilet is that a stationary “vault” toilet has a big tank and a portable one has a small tank. If one wants to make the difference clear it would be easy to add portable=yes/no where applicable.

Btw. related to national park/forest campgrounds these tank toilets are the predecessor of composting toilets. Better than simple pit latrines which are not very appetizing and cause pollution which is definitely not wanted in such areas, but they need some machinery for discharging the tanks and require further treatment or disposal of the content. Composting toilets don’t need that. They are more expensive in construction but cheaper in the long run.

I’d say the reason is that this reflects what most people see - it it is not a flush toilet it must be a pit latrine. I am sure that many mappers do not make a difference, if an outhouse is really a pit latrine or if it is a tank (or vault) toilet.

4

I am unsure how a mapper can reliably tell whether the toilet is composting or simply collecting (and possibly drying, separating liquids etc.).

And while this is not a basis for opposition to mapping it, I’m not sure for whom the distinction is valuable, in context of public toilets. The user experience is more or less the same in my experience. Or rather there’s more difference coming from the specific implementation details rather than if it’s composting or not.

1 Like
5

A composting toilet can easily be identified by it’s structure, on top of a container with a door to take out the compost accasionally. No other tank toilet looks like this.

This is a question we normally don’t ask in OSM. If an object exists, we can map it as precisely as possible. And those potential users, who are a bit sensitive in view of look & smell, might well choose a campground with a hygienic composting toilet instead of a pit latrine.

6

This is exactly where I am on toilets:disposal=tank and if it is meant to describe a vault toilet. They are certainly not portable. They are correctly called vault toilets. When you look at a campground page, this is how they are listed. For instance, Fish Lake has 5 vault toilets. I have also seen flush, composting, and pit. There are very few pits these days because, as you say, they leech waste and contaminate the area and have been replaced for places with more than a certain number of visitors.

When I look at the values given, I see something that is probably not the result of thoughtful discussion so much as different “latrine” items getting added in because someone appended the word “pit” to “latrine” while trying to distinguish flush from not flush, or more probably, will you be confronted with other people’s waste or not.

First we have toilets:disposal=chemical, which is what I have always used to refer to portable toilets that have a pool of blue liquid in the bottom of them and have to be pumped out. Some of these go into permanent installation, so it would be reasonable to map. However, it’s a latrine where the pit is lined, above ground, and filled with a chemical. The example picture on the side is a flush toilet that happens to use a chemical other than water for the flush, which is a distinctly different sort of toilet. Notice that flush indicates it is usually water, but it doesn’t have to be. (This actually has 5544 uses, so some folks aren’t too bothered that it is two different toilets at least.)

Then toilets:disposal=bucket is just an ever smaller above ground pit. I clicked on the example picture to see if it was actually of a flush toilet using a bucket of water rather than a tank of water with a lever as a flush mechanism. It is labeled “simple dry toilet on the site”. Which is to say it is actually the next listing, toilets:disposal=dry_toilet. (We get 2161 buckets and 452 dry_toilets, so someone is willing to differentiate. How?)

Then toilets:disposal=tank which appears to be a chemical toilet without the chemical. (Just 111 of these. Not good for something actually listed in the Wiki.)

The only thing I can’t shoehorn into the most general “flush” or “pitlatrine” categories is the toilets:disposal=incineration, and that might just be because I have no experience with this one. There are only 2 uses. If it gathers the waste for a while, it could probably be a “pitlatrine” and the further disposal can be added in the same way composting=yes is just being added in.

Unfortunately, the only discussion I know of on any of the matter is on my own diary entry from a couple years ago which I did not escalate to forum discussion because I’m ~20 years sober of Usenet and feeling much better now. I do make an effort to describe why the casual user might care about the difference between a pit and a vault as well as pointing out that more sophisticated users definitely care.

In taginfo, there’s 786 toilets:disposal=pour_flush, which is just getting picky about how you flush. Often this is just a broken tank on a regular flush toilet. The one I’ve used just didn’t actually have water plumbed to it, so you had to go across the street to get water to flush with a bucket. It’s still very much a flush toilet, but people want to differentiate.

There’s 550 toilets:disposal=septic_tank, which is not something that I would have been able to distinguish from toilets:disposal=sewer (not used so far) had I not been at the Leggit rest stop when the septic tank overflow warning was going. So now there’s a septic tank I can tell from a sewer, but I find it easier to distinguish a vault from a pit. Again, people want to differentiate.

There’s 102 improved_pitlatrine (no idea what that is) and 73 full_flushed (again, what?) before we get to the 69 vault and 48 composting. There’s 46 blair_ventilated_improved_pitlatrine which hopefully is something one can at least look up. There’s 7 pit so weren’t satisfied with pitlatrine for that.

Which all gets back to the first statement that the Wiki entry needs a clean up. Is the disposal just the immediate disposal of the waste? Or the slightly more long term disposal? Some people clearly want to split flush up as they are using the undocumented septic_tank as well as a couple septic, although they are willing to assume sewer. However, the vast majority seem to be just looking for if the waste sticks around (72910 pitlatrine) or goes “away” (79363 flush). It needs to be clarified that only the immediate disposal is the concern, if that is the case, and these descriptions patched up to show how encompassing they are. If it is not, then the most used flush really isn’t a disposal at all as hinted by the 2nd most used undocumented value of septic_tank. Also, people like to get detailed about their flush just as we want to get detailed about the latrine leading to the most used undocumented value of pour_flush.

Anyway, without the history, I can’t know for sure what was meant. Usage has been mostly as a stand in for toilets:flush=yes/no, but there’s plenty of actual disposal values as well as just getting into the reeds about the flush mechanism.

And I’ll try not to write any further essays on the matter.

3 Likes
7

A lot of toilets are built with the seat on top of a container. And if you go behind the toilet there’s a door. If it’s a directly exposed compost door, yes that’s quite distinct. But what if whatever is inside is fully contained in the toilet structure? E.g. a toilet originally built for an open bucket has been retrofitted with a composting container.

If an intrepid mapper wishes to explore further, they of course have my blessing. But what I’m driving at is that just making a distinction between flushed or not should ideally be easy to tag, and that composting or not should perhaps be an implementation detail one level down in the hierarchy.

8

Sure, that would be an option. But if we already have a set of dinstinctive Tags beside flush and pit, which are partially overlapping, why should we not have one for composting toilets, which can easily be distinguished from other types.

I am not talking about tiny models for private use incorporating a seat on top of a small container, but for public models with an outhouse on top of a container and usually also proudly marked as eco friendly and sustainable composting toilet.

Following the Kiss principle this would be toilets:disposal=composting and not toilets:disposal=pitlatrine + composting=yes which is kind of trolltagging anyhow.

9

Thanks for your comprehensive statement. Apparently you know much more about this issue than myself. A messy selection of values for a certain key usually is built up step by step when people without deeper knowledge start creating tags on the run. toilets:disposal=* is not the only key where this had happened. For sure it would always be better to invite some expert and develop a comprehensive tagging scheme for a new kind of objects but this does not happen in reality. And again, even after having created a set of values some mappers still invent their own (following the ATYL principle) which results in something like 97 values for toilets:disposal out of which many are incomprehensible and others completely nonsense. One will find these messy lists for nearly every key used in OSM.

Another thing is that OSM does not always use the same terms for objects as used in real life. A vault definitely is a kind of tank, someone who is not familiar with the term vault toilet will start calling it tank toilet and others will go ahead with it. I myself have not heard the term vault toilet before and I’d tag it as tank toilet without hesitation.

Unfortunately cleaning up the wiki page is not that simple. One would have to draw up a tagging scheme with proper values and define which values would have to be replaced. This scheme would have to be discussed and if some kind of consensus is reached, the wiki page has to be rewritten and those values to be replaced would have to be deprecated and probably updated in the database. This goes far beyond my own suggestion which is a simple tag for composting toilets.

10

Tags we have for this based on use:

toilets:disposal=composting, compost, Compost, Komposttoilette, Composting, toilets:composting=yes

Tags we have based on the Wiki, also used:

toilets:disposal=pitlatrine+composting=yes

Is disposal meant to mean the immediate disposal, where “latrine” had “pit” prepended to it for unknown, maybe historical reasons? If yes: then a composting toilet is a “pitlatrine” because the waste remains in the area. If no: then probably flush isn’t really valid.

11

This probably is not how those values got into the Wiki in the first place. Some people just edit it. I put a comment in the discussion when I was upset about vault toilets, which of course went nowhere.

I think many people are going to argue there is a simple tag. It’s pitlatrine.

You many be overestimating my knowledge. I’m just trying to poke around and see and making guesses. I hope I’ve been explicit where I’m making guesses.

Unless those toilets at Little Yosemite are composting toilets, the only one I can remember using is the one at Trail Camp below Mount Whitney in Inyo National Forest in 1991. It’s not the same one as is there now. It was stinky as any pit, but we weren’t allowed to piss in it. It didn’t feel more sanitary, as you said these are elsewhere.

12

I do not understand what your target is.You wrote

Agreed. This are the most common types and we do have values for flush and pit already. Vault toilets are tagged as tank toilets at the time being. I want to document the tag for the composting type to replace the recommendation for toilets:disposal=pitlatrine+composting=yes .

There are

and moreover compostable and vermicompost. This is the usual messy value list for OSM keys I described above. I want to document the most used toilets:disposal=composting and forget about the messy rest. Any problem with this?

That is what I described above. Everyone can document values, which are in use, in the wiki. If you would like to document toilets:disposal=vault feel free to do so. As there is toilets:disposal=tank already (with similar meaning) it would be better to discuss adding your value to the wiki here in the forum before going ahead. That is the reason why I opened this topic here. Asking the community is not compulsory but it helps avoid stress lateron.

Cleaning up the wiki and replacing values which are in use since years is a completely other issue. Thas is what I described above. Not my business at the moment.

Btw. the value pitlatrine is most probably written in one word by error. The preset in iD reads Pit Latrine which is correct imo. See also Minor issue with the presets of iD - #38 by Map_HeRo.

13

When there are specific words for a thing that are not used for that thing, it creates confusion. Perhaps UK English does not use the specific word “vault” for this type of toilet, but it is one I have seen used for a few decades.

This depends on how the toilets:disposal tag is meant to be used. Two values on the Wiki are clearly used and the rest have little use in spite of the visibility of documentation. The definitions provided are confusing, the examples sometimes contradictory. It needs clarification, probably subtraction. (Do we have any idea what process was used in adding everything after pitlatrine? Frankly, I can’t get behind it needing more effort to change something that doesn’t seem to be being used than it was to make it in the first place. iD only shows flush, pitlatrine, chemical, and bucket.)

The vast majority of the usage appears to be that flush is any toilet that removes the waste from the area of the toilet and pitlatrine is any toilet where the waste remains. The composting toilet fits in the second category already. (As does the vault and most the values not getting much use.) The hole is above ground, so must be lined to exist, but it is still a hole where waste gathers.

Perhaps that is a valuable distinction to make clearly? Keeping in mind that this is already a secondary tag only used on almost 30% of toilets, would it not be better to call it pitlatrine and clarify the type of pitlatrine in another tag? This would seem to be what is clumsily being pushed with composting=yes.

This actually is a problem when the values proliferate. You said you would tag a vault as a tank without hesitation, but most would tag both composting and vault as pitlatrine without hesitation. If there are too many choices, suddenly they start hesitating and eventually not answering at all. On the other hand, not having well defined values can also lead to not answering at all (which is another thing that pops up in that old diary entry.)

I agree that it’s not a good solution. Composting should be part of a list of possibilities which this documented solution does not recognize. But how is it trolltagging?

2 Likes
14

in my limited experience (I may be wrong!) composting toilet is a subset of pit latrine

more specifically you use it like pit latrine and difference in what will happen with feces in future is nonobvious to user

I guess the extra problem is that I have seen in Finland toilet that was described as composting toilet and had no such thing at all? It was a hole dug into ground.

15

Hole in the ground would be illegal in present-day Finland, which is not to say that doesn’t exist.

In context of non-flushing public toilets, ”outhouse” isn’t a disambiguating word. ”Container” only disambiguates from a ”hole in the ground” setup, but the outhouse building may have the same basic design for all of ”hole in the ground”, ”open barrel” a composting container type solutions.

I agree that sometimes there are clearly visible features of composting (obvious composting container with a visible thermometer, vents etc.), and I have no problem with specific tagging when that’s the case.

16

maybe it was more complex with liner of some form? I was definitely not inspecting closely lower level carefully

maybe important part was hidden by snow? There was definitely a lot of it

17

Maybe a better model of this all is the surface tag for roads, where two values could be used to cover it all, but more detailed ones are desirable. It just seems that in toilets:disposal, it’s fewer people who desire more detail.

The two tags flush and pitlatrine cover waste goes away or waste is stored. That you have to climb to hang out over the hole doesn’t make it less a hole. Where it is cost prohibitive to dig and wheelchairs aren’t accommodated, a vault toilet may also be set on the ground with stairs.

The awkward language on the Wiki certainly seems to be trying to get there and still needs sorted out. How you could help is when you detail the use of toilets:disposal=composting, specify that it is a “type of pit latrine that…” and remember that the national park versions might be the premium ones of something that is sometimes a bucket with sawdust beside.

I’d still like someone to chime in with an actual opinion, though it is good to see the confirmation of the “it’s all pitlatrine” folks.

This checks out! Well, unless composting toilet requires that the compost is harvested. Los Padres Forest Association volunteers end up tasked with digging the new holes for the old pits in the backcountry camps. They tell me that sometimes they end up digging in an old hole, but they only know it from the plastic tampon applicators. Everything else is just dirt.

1 Like
18

I am absolutely with you and have claimed that at least a dozen times in other topics. The answer I received is that terms we use in OSM must not be the same as used in real life.

That is how it is. See Wiki tag pages without proposal process for more details.

And also this reply in the parallel topic Minor issue with the presets of iD - #43 by Mateusz_Konieczny

No doubt about that, but other mappers like to specify more details and that is why additional tags have been created.

I understand your concern but this is not the subject of this topic here. If you would like to clean up the amenity=toilet wiki page the right approach would be to open a separate topic for it, explain your concern (as you alrady did here) and make a proposal how to do it better. My support is granted.

The subject here is only how to specify a composting toilet within the present scheme. In meantime I did some more research and apparently “dry toilet” is in fact a synonyme for “composting toilet”. It is even mentioned on the wikipedia article about composting toilets where I did not notice it before. I will add this information to the toilets wiki page - no need any longer for another tag to be documented. Problem solved.

A “hole dug into ground” definitely does not describe a composting toilet but a pit latrine. For more details see

Pit latrine - Wikipedia
Composting toilet - Wikipedia

1 Like
19

no it is not. A composting toilet is one kind of dry toilet, which is the broader term and only means that no water is used for flushing.

And the wikipedia article you link confirms this in the first sentence.