FOOD + WATER = well, POOP!

When the trucks stop and the toilets back up, what will you do with your waste? This is your post-collapse primer for managing without magic pipes or municipal grace. Because food + water = well, poop... and what you do next might just save your life.

Reed bed water filtration. Photo: Cree Water Solutions

There’s always more to mend, more to build, more to fix on a farmstead. The work is physical, often cyclic, and never really done. Add to that the quiet revolution of cutting ourselves loose from society’s consumables—as Geoff calls them—and the list only lengthens. So projects ebb and flow with the seasons, some pushing forward, some waiting for winter, all threaded through the rhythm of weather and will.

Our solar water heater never copes with long stretches of grey sky, and the LPG backup—that’s a fossil thread we’re trying to snip. This time of year, Geoff starts circling his biogas plans again. The idea isn’t new. It’s just never quite climbed to the top of the list. Not yet. But the moment feels closer now, as the urgency of self-reliance sharpens, and the sun turns its back just long enough for us to feel the edge of need.

Some of it I understand. I make compost. I know what methane is. But the mechanics? That’s the domain of Geoff’s skilled fingers and his quiet conversations with physics. He’s aiming for a system that turns excess kitchen waste—anything that doesn’t go to the worm farm—into cooking and water heating gas. Eventually, he wants it to handle our blackwater too (that’s everything normally flushed down the toilet, for the uninitiated).

Let’s not dance around it. If you’ve got food and water, you’ve got waste. And when the trucks stop, the trash can goes uncollected, the pipes back up—what used to disappear will come home. We’ve built an entire civilisation on the fantasy of disappearance. Flush. Toss. Forget. Until forgetting becomes dangerous. Because waste isn’t the problem. Pretending it isn’t ours is.

My recent essays have focused on growing food and catching water. It makes sense that the next frontier is what happens after. This is a post-collapse primer for when the municipal magic ends—when survival means rethinking what you flush, bury, burn, or bless back into the soil.

Let’s start with what stinks.

Poop, Pee, and Scatology

Most people still live under the porcelain illusion: that waste disappears with the push of a button. It doesn’t. It travels. It’s pumped, processed, filtered (badly), and often dumped at sea. When that system fails, you don’t get a grace period. You get a health crisis. Fast.

Septic tanks buy you time, but they’re finite. They fill. Some rely on chemicals. Some rely on power. Once full, you either pay a premium to pump them out or watch your plumbing erupt in rebellion. Ours feeds into a seepage system—gravel, roots, sediment, sunlight—but it’s an exception possible because we have a lot of land. It’s not the rule.

Composting toilets, though? Bloody marvellous. You can buy a high-end system, or build one with a bucket, a seat, some sawdust or shredded paper, and a tight-fitting lid. Keep the pee out if you can—that’s where the stink lives. Let it rest for a year in a warm, dry corner, and you’ve got humanure: rich, clean, safe. Not glamorous, but survival rarely is. And honestly, once you get past the porcelain spell, it starts to feel less like compromise and more like common sense.

Still squeamish? Try a tree bog. A raised platform over fast-growing plants—willow, banana, bamboo. Waste goes in, trees grow up. Self-fertilising privacy. No turning. No buckets. No fuss. Just the slow, silent cycle of nutrient and renewal, hidden under leaf and root.

Want to cook dinner with your own crap? That’s biogas. Anaerobic digestion: no oxygen, just bacteria doing their ancient work. What comes out is methane. Capture it right, and you can light your stove. It stinks, until it doesn’t. But when the LPG runs out and the trucks don’t come, it starts to feel a lot less absurd and a lot more like survival.

Caught short? Dig a long drop (as we call them in Australia). The foundation of the outhouse your great grandparents knew. Deep and distant. Cover well. Rotate every couple of years. Not ideal for suburbia, but it’ll get you through in a pinch.

And don’t waste your pee. Dilute it 1:10 and pour it around your trees or onto the compost. It’s not a problem. It’s a solution with a bad reputation—a nutrient-dense elixir that plants love, so long as it’s given gently.

Greywater and Green Thinking

Greywater—everything from the sink, shower, or laundry. It looks dirty, but it’s treasure in collapse. The trick is not to let it pool or fester. The trick is where you send it.

Simplest method? Pipe it straight to a mulch basin around a tree. The roots and microbes handle the rest. Add gravel trenches if it pools. Rotate the flow. Keep it moving. Let the soil do what it’s been doing for millennia. Kitchen greywater often needs a grease trap—a bucket-in-a-bucket with mesh or steel wool to catch the fats. Clean it often. Ignore it and you’ll regret it. When it clogs, you’ll curse the day you poured oil down the sink.

Want to take it further? Build a reed bed. Dig a trench, line it with gravel. Let the water meander through a flowing bed of reeds (Phragmites australis), bulrush (Typha latifolia), yellow flag (Iris pseudacorus), or burr reed (Sparganium erectum). As water flows through, the roots, microbes, and sediment filter and clean. It’s a frog haven that just happens to be processing your bathwater. Beautiful, functional, and low-maintenance.

To reuse it in the house? You’ll need a slow sand filter. Stack coarse gravel, fine gravel, and then sand in a tall container. The water trickles through, drop by patient drop. At the top, a microbial mat forms—the schmutzdecke—breaking down nasties as it goes. No power. No moving parts. Just gravity, time, and microbial magic doing what machines can’t.

But it all fails if you’re still pouring poison down the drain. Harsh cleaners kill the cycle. So go full hippie. Vinegar to shine. Bicarb to scrub. Soap for the skin. If you wouldn’t drink it, or won’t wash with it. That’s the rule.

The Compost Crew

Food waste sounds low-risk until the trash collection doesn’t come. Then it’s rats and rot and the smell of old regret. So compost. It’s not a chore. It’s a sacred act of return. Go classic: green and brown, layered like lasagne. Keep it moist, not soggy. Turn when you can. Cover it in rain. If it smells add carbon. If it feels cold, add nitrogen—scraps, fresh manure, or a splash of pee. Let the pile breathe and it will reward you with soil.

Short on time or space? Bokashi it. Bran and molasses in an airtight bucket. Ferments to a pickle. Bury it and it breaks down fast. Brilliant for small spaces and tight corners. No stink. No flies. Just transformation.

Want luxury? Worms. Red wigglers turn scraps into castings and liquid gold. Keep them cool, dark, and moist. Feed them the scraps from your kitchen, but go low on citrus, onions, meat. With regular feeding and a bit of love they’ll give you back a miracle—a living compost that smells of the forest floor.

Resourceful Ruins

When there’s nowhere left to toss trash, you start seeing it differently. Learn how to stack and store materials for later. Excess paper and fabric scraps and can be wetted, compressed, and sun-dried into bricks for fires. Slow to dry, hot to burn. Not elegant, but effective.

Plastics? Avoid them. But if you’ve got them, know your codes. HDPE and PP—2 and 5—can be melted and reshaped. The rest is toxic to burn and hell to store.

But hoard your glass and metal. Jars become fermenters. Bottles, drip-feeders. Tins, tool parts. Channel your inner village tinker. Nothing’s waste. Everything waits for its next life.

Nothing to Waste

Collapse doesn’t mean filth. It means remembering. The outhouse. The rag bag. The compost pile. The quiet magic of putting things in the right place. Waste isn’t a nuisance. It’s misplaced life.

Put it in the right place, and it feeds you. Start where you are. Pee on the lemon tree. Share worm juice. Trade buckets. Set up community drop-offs. Teach your kids where things go when there’s no truck to take them away. Let them grow up knowing the cycle instead of the system.

Because waste is communal. It always has been. The trick is managing it together, not pretending it vanishes. The trick is reclaiming the loop before it breaks.

Because yes—food + water = poop. But that’s not the end.

It’s the beginning of everything that comes next.

Solidarity & Soil

---

I walked away from the algorithm’s choke-hold to work where it counts: hands in soil, words on the page, shoulder to shoulder and word to word with those adapting to climate chaos. This is fire-and-flood writing—scorched, storm-beaten, and stubborn. If it moves you, pass it on like a sandbag in rising water.

There’ll be no paywalls here, ever—climate collapse is brutal enough. But if you’ve got coin, become a paid subscriber. Every dime fuels the RESILIENT ROOTS GROWER COLLECTIVE, where we’re seeding trial-by-fire systems and hard-won knowledge.

And if you’re looking for practical tools, maps, and field notes for the road ahead, start with A COLLECTIVE GUIDE TO SURVIVING CLIMATE COLLAPSE.