One of our goals was to have a “normal” toilet experience in the SeaPod while still being safe for the environment. Most toilets on boats or composting toilets don’t use water, you can’t flush toilet paper, or they use chemicals to decompose everything. We didn’t want something like this, and of course, we won’t just dump the sewage into the ocean.

Our solution was an incinerator toilet that separates solid waste from liquid waste and burns the solid waste into a few grams of totally harmless and safe ash. Here we have a short animation that gives you a rough explanation of the process.

We start off with the toilet. You will use the toilet just like any other toilet in your home. It will have water and flush normally so that you won’t have to make any adjustments or sacrifice comfort and convenience. The magic happens after the flush.

After the toilet is flushed, the liquid waste is strained out from the solid waste by the poop separator. The solid waste sits on the poop scale. The scale measures the amount of waste so that we can be more efficient with the propane that we will use. When the weight threshold is met, the poop is moved into the incineration chamber where it will be burned by the jet burners.

The liquid waste that goes through the strainer will go through a cleaning process and after cleaning will be recycled back into the toilet and used for flushing again. By recycling the water we can save the freshwater that will be used for things like drinking, washing dishes, or showering.

This is a very simple overview of a pretty complex system that will be happening autonomously and behind the scenes. We don’t often think about where everything goes after the flush. For some, it is through the municipal waste system, others have a septic tank, and the SeaPod has its very own incinerator toilet system.