But he is not stopping in Falmouth for long: shortly after Christmas, Febos will hit the road in his Rabbit, armed with nothing more than a camera, a laptop, and a tank full of vegetable oil.

Combining his interest in low-impact living with a quest to find other people who are setting that example, Febos plans to drive across the country in his vegetable oil-powered car.

With a binder of information as a road map, he plans to visit at least 35 sustainable projects in urban and rural locales, hoping to gain insight and inspiration into how society can design itself according to ecological principles.

In what may be viewed as a modern-day version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Febos plans to blog his way across America.

I’m documenting the life process of living more sustainably and happily, while minimizing my use of resources and assessing my impact on the blog. The idea is to inspire people to see how others are making their lives more sustainable with fun, cool projects. That way people can see how they can make changes in their lives.

-Barry Febos

Creating, not consuming

For Febos, repurposing waste products into useful materials is a way of life—and a form of artistic expression.

His journey began in October with a “live-in” exhibition in a Baltimore gallery, entitled “Moving to Utopia: unpacking a quest for a more sustainable life,” a slogan that is also stenciled onto the side of the Rabbit.

Living in the gallery for a week, Mr. Febos depicted his planned journey through photos, drawings, maps, and video, while cataloguing his possessions and “auctioning off” the items he deemed unnecessary. He plans to do a version of this show in New Orleans, and another when he returns to Falmouth.

His previous art projects have included making notebooks out of plastic bags and paper that had been printed on one side, making windows out of glass bottles, and a hammock made of used fabric and plastic bags.

One man’s food is another man’s fuel

While working on community art projects in Baltimore, Febos started to get interested in the mechanics of biodiesel engines a couple years ago. He bought the Rabbit, already equipped with a vegetable oil conversion system built into it, and started imagining the possibilities.

“Having a vehicle that runs on veggie oil seemed like a way to creatively use other people’s waste,” he said.

Though diesel engines can run on straight bio-diesel, using discarded vegetable oil requires a few additional steps, said Febos.

First, one has to find a source of oil. Usually, restaurants and fast-food establishments have to pay to dispose of the used oil, and are only too happy to have someone take it off their hands, he said. A classified-type website, Fillup4free.com, is another source for finding free or cheap waste oil.

Once he collects 10 gallons to fill a separate fuel tank, the oil must then be filtered to remove any food particles or water.  Febos has constructed a simple filtration system using plastic buckets and fine-meshed cloth.

He plans to have several gallons of oil filtering while he drives—so as to avoid running out of fuel with no McDonald’s in miles.

Bio-diesel mechanics

One issue with a built-in conversion system is that diesel engines cannot start with vegetable oil, and the car must be warmed up completely before switching over to the bio-diesel source. Therefore, the Rabbit has a regular fuel tank for starting the car and flushing oil from the fuel lines during the last few miles of each journey, Febos said.

“The conversion system is not as good for driving locally. For a three- to four-mile trip it doesn’t really work,” he said.

Mr. Febos plans to take the southern route across the United States, where warmer temperatures should make the oil less likely to congeal. He said the Rabbit gets up to 50 miles per gallon while running on either regular diesel or vegetable oil.

In addition to getting an MPG that rivals hybrid vehicles, running a car on veggie oil benefits the environment in a number of ways.

According to the non-profit educational organization, NOLS, running your car on recycled veggie oil:

• Makes us more energy independent. As long as people eat French fries, there will always be an oil source. Plus, your tailpipe will give off the pleasant odor of fried food, instead of toxic fumes!
• Reduces our dependence on oil from foreign sources or environmentally sensitive areas.
• Does not release sulfuric acid (SO2) into the atmosphere, one of the main causes of acid rain.
• Reduces our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by 78%.
• Produces 48% less carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas, than regular diesel fuel.
• Creates 48% less asthma-causing particulate matter, and 80% less cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH’s) than petroleum diesel.

Connecting the dots

The first stop on Febos’s itinerary is just a few miles from his parents’ home. Having received some guidance on biodiesel vehicles from Joseph L. Hackler, a member of the Alchemy Farm Neighborhood Association, Febos plans to start his blog with a post about the agricultural and renewable energy projects at Alchemy Farm, home of the former New Alchemy Insitute.

Other highlights of the journey will include the Germantown Community Farm in upstate New York, where a fellow Falmouth native, Kaya Weidman, is working on starting up a community radio station, WGXC.

He also plans to visit a shanty boat project in Providence, Rhode Island, where a group has created something like a floating ark, complete with a vegetable garden and chickens and ducks on board.

Farther south, Febos plans to visit intentional communities in Virginia and Tennessee, staying for a while in each place to blog and contribute to projects. He also plans to visit the Project M Lab’s Rural Studio in Greensboro, Alabama, where designers tackle problems and find solutions for poor communities.

“I’m still learning. I want to see and participate in what people are doing, so that later I’ll have the resources to make things happen,” Febos said.

Earle Barnhart and Hilde Maingay, whose nonprofit organization, The Green Center, is the successor to the New Alchemy Institute, is concerned that the “big pipe” solutions being discussed by a town committee are inefficient and expensive ways to reduce nitrogen loading to Falmouth’s coastal ponds.

The husband and wife team have compiled nine options that residents can undertake to eliminate nutrients from wastewater. They suggest that a feasibility study be conducted to see how much nitrogen would be eliminated, and at what cost, under each scenario.
“With a great variety of options available right now, home-based systems can be designed to respond to the specific needs of each individual residence or area of concern, require very little design time or costs, can be installed immediately, and have a great degree of inherent flexibility,” wrote the couple in a five-page handout they e-mailed yesterday to Town Meeting members.

• Residents can reduce their nitrogen contribution by using low-nitrogen and phosphorus-free soaps, cleaners, and detergents.
• Eliminating the use of chemical fertilizers and garbage disposals would also reduce the amount of nitrogen in the waste stream.
• Noting that car exhaust and road runoff is a significant source of nitrogen deposition to estuaries, residents can reduce their mileage or switch to a hybrid vehicle.
• On a townwide level,  Falmouth could collect food waste separately from garbage to make compost, thereby using the nitrogen and other nutrients in food as fertilizer.

For those who think it is too hard to incorporate these tips into their lives, Hilde and Earle are living examples. They own a composting toilet, which they say is inexpensive and easy to maintain. As professional landscapers, they use compost and organic fertilizers, and at home they feed food scraps to their chickens and use plant-based cleaning products.

The Bigger Picture

A large-scale oyster aquaculture project could clean up Falmouth's coastal ponds, create jobs and increase local food production

Drawing from the expertise of farmer and aquaculture researcher Ronald J. Smolowitz and Woods Hole resident Ronald D. Zweig, an aquaculture specialist for the World Bank, Hilde and Earle recommend using oysters as  natural filters for nitrogen, and widening the inlets of coastal ponds to increase tidal exchange.

A centralized sewer system, while effective at removing nitrogen, comes with a high cost and long lead time to design, construct, and operate, the authors wrote. In terms of water and energy consumption, it is also inefficient.

Purifying water for drinking, then polluting it with human waste, and cleaning it again is inefficient. Transporting large volumes of water from a supply source to a pumping station, to homes, to a sewage treatment plant, and finally to a discharge area is inefficient.

A variety of sources contribute nitrogen to groundwater, but a majority leaches from underground septic tanks

If wastewater treatment was viewed as a “closed-loop” system, the nutrients it contains could be recovered, treated, and used as organic fertilizer, say Hilde and Earle.

Composting toilets

A composting toilet: the only difference is the pipe

The waterless composting toilet is one of the options Hilde and Earle propose for further study.

It looks like a regular toilet, without a pipe. A fan ensures that odors are released through a pipe in the roof, requiring as much energy as a 60-watt bulb.

“The lower the technology, the less likely it is to fail,” said Hilde.

“That’s right,” said Earle. “Gravity never breaks down.”

The holding tank of a Clivus composting toilet

Collection requires a basement storage tank for solid waste, which is typically removed four times a year.

Though current health codes require off-site disposal, the sterilized waste could be used as commercial fertilizer or at home for non-food crops.

Urine-diverting & packaging toilets

Another option is a urine-diverting toilet with an optional waterless urinal.

With this technology, naturally sterile urine is collected in a basement storage unit, where it can be collected for fertilizer, or be processed in a septic or sewer system.

Hilde and Earle also propose a few options for using waterless packaging toilets and urinals. These options would require a commercial contractor to collect waste “packets,” which can be sterilized and composted to create fertilizer.

The British-designed "Loowatt" toilet was originally built with the waste disposal needs of developing countries in mind.

Alternatively, the packets may be incinerated, either at home or off-site—not unlike throwing out diapers, Hilde noted.

The waste packets can be used in a bio-gas digester, which produces methane gas while killing off pathogens.

The result is a potent fertilizer suitable for edible crops.

Alternative Cost-Benefits

Based on each of these options, traditional toilets do not necessarily have to be replaced. With each of these options, a home would have to keep its septic tank in order to process the “gray water” from the kitchen and laundry.

They suggest studying the costs and benefits of maintaining the current septic treatment at most homes, with the addition of aquaculture and the widening of coastal inlets.

Jobs, food, and fertilizers could be created from this endeavor, whereby not only the oysters, but also the wastes and the macro-algae that grows around them could be harvested as fertilizer.

“Why don’t we try it  and see how much [nitrogen] is removed by reducing our inputs, then we can go to the next step?” asked Earle.

An Ecological Treatment System

This schematic by Ron Zweig proposes a centralized treatment system based on John Todd's ecological design principles

Another option is to install a centralized treatment plant with ecological principles in mind.

In this design, wastewater is treated with a biogas digester that releases methane, which can be used as energy to run the system– or cook food or heat a home.

The primary-treated water is then filtered through aquatic plants and wetlands, where the nitrates decompose and are consumed by beneficial bacteria. These aquatic plants may be composted, and the treated water can be reused to irrigate trees and non-edible plants.

Recognizing that not all residents would be comfortable installing an alternative toilet in their homes, Hilde noted that it will take serious study, modeling, and public outreach for people to understand that the systems are safe and just as effective as traditional toilets.

“We assume that we’re incapable of handling our own waste. That’s a really bad assumption,” she said.

Earle Barnhart has a vision for food sustainability on Cape Cod

In a white paper he wrote for his nonprofit educational institute, The Green Center, Barnhart discusses how—and why—Cape Codders should reduce their reliance on imported food.

In his paper, Barnhart makes the case for food self-sufficiency, which he argues will reduce the cost of food, lower the region’s carbon footprint, and increase food security on Cape Cod.

“One of the advantages of living on Cape Cod is that we can very clearly see the source of our food supply. Most of our food is imported over the bridge in trucks,” wrote Barnhart.

“Food produced regionally would provide a degree of insurance against the volatility of international economics and the disruption of food supply in turbulent times.”

Hilde picks fresh pea pods for lunch

Most supermarket produce is shipped thousands of miles to get from the farm to the dinner table. Due to energy-intensive transportation and fertilizer production, deforestation and concentrated livestock farming, agriculture is one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Meanwhile, fresh produce and eggs from a backyard garden require absolutely no fossil fuels and have higher nutritional value to boot, said Barnhart.

While many residents enjoy gardening as a hobby, few would be able to live on what they produce at home. Using his own yard and greenhouse as tests for decades of research conducted at the New Alchemy Institute, Barnhart and his wife, Hilde Maingay, have found that intensive gardening and permaculture methods have resulted in a shorter grocery list year-round.

The Cape Cod Ark

The Cape Cod Ark House is designed to provide the essentials for modern living based on nature's principles

By planting crops with varying root depths close together and rotating crops with different nutritional needs, even a small garden can produce a hefty amount of vegetables, Barnhart said.

The couple’s large greenhouse makes use of passive solar heat to grow crops 12 months a year, and cold frames can do the same on a smaller scale.

Nutrient-rich water from the fish ponds feeds greehouse plants year-round

A few water tanks inside the greenhouse serve a dual function. Filled with algae-rich dark green water, they host catfish and goldfish, types of fish that digest the green algae to produce high-nutrient waste that Barnhart feeds to the lemon trees and nursery plants in the greenhouse. The fish themselves could be eaten, but in this case, they serve a more decorative purpose.

Barnhart and Maingay eat a vegetable-rich diet, but they also rely on eggs from a number of hens they raise in a fenced-off, shaded area.

By feeding the chickens kitchen scraps, those nutrients are “converted into a clean, highly nutritious egg, biologically packaged in an organic eggshell,” Barnhart wrote.

If more people kept hens, food waste that is otherwise incinerated, buried, or sent to septic tanks and sewers, would be diverted back into the nutrient cycle, he said.

Citing research conducted at New Alchemy and in his own back yard, Barnhart said that a year’s worth of fresh vegetables per person can be grown on as little as 1/100th of an acre—or 450 square feet, equivalent to a 15-by-30-foot garden. To grow grains, a quarter of an acre per person is necessary; if chickens or livestock are raised, at least 3/10ths of an acre are required.

A sustainable equation

Earle checks out his salad beds in mid-June

Considering that Cape Cod has 226,000 year-round residents and about 250,000 acres of land, self-sufficiency could hypothetically be achieved under this model.

The problem is that a majority of that acreage is covered by roads, buildings, or conservation restrictions, notes Barnhart.

Acknowledging that the Cape does not have enough available land to feed its year-round population with land-intensive crops; nor is it sufficient to feed the millions of tourists who visit each year, Barnhart suggests that the available land be used to cultivate fresh fruits and vegetables, and that residents continue to import staple grains, meat, sweeteners, and oils.

Waste or Asset?

Another challenge of intensive gardening is the need for fertilizer to replenish nutrients in Cape Cod’s sandy, clay-filled soil. Instead of relying on petrochemicals, Barnhart suggests that Cape Cod’s biggest environmental problem—nitrogen pollution—could be turned into an asset for agriculture, by developing a system to process human waste into fertilizer.

Putting waste into clean water, where it then has to be processed out with chemicals, does not make ecological sense, Barnhart points out.

“It is an ecological error to put waste into water in the first place,” he said.

The couple has a composting toilet in their home, which collects waste in the basement, allowing it to decompose while a fan directs odors through a pipe in the roof. The result is about four bushels of compost a year, which must be buried nine inches underground, according to MA law.

(For more information on composting toilets, please see a previous post, Turning Waste Into Compost)

In his paper, Barnhart proposes an even more manageable system: packaging toilets.

“These are conventional-looking toilets that direct the post-eaten food into an absorbent, deodorized, biodegradable package in the toilet that is sealed after each use and is stored in the base,”  Barnhart wrote.

The isolated unit does not use any electricity or water, and satisfies hygienic sensibilities, Barnhart said. Packaging toilets are marketed by the Swedish company Pacto, and are often used in wilderness areas.

“There will inevitably be a need for the creation of new businesses, new occupations, new skills and improved ecological education,” Barnhart wrote.

“The personal and political change required to facilitate the transition is likely to be slower and less certain, but will be just as necessary to achieve the kind of world we want to live in.”

While it is understood that the town’s efforts will improve water quality and biological habitat, these benefits may not be realized in our lifetimes, due to the estimated 25-50 years it could take for all the contaminated groundwater to flush through the estuaries. Many residents balk at the $250-600 million price tag, which will likely be financed through betterment fees for homeowners and tax levies for all residents.

A message from Karen Schwalbe of Hatchville sums up the problem and offers a potential solution:

There is an old adage:  if you take a barrel of sewage and add a teaspoon of wine, you get a barrel of sewage; if you take a barrel of wine and add a teaspoon of sewage, you get a barrel of sewage… Adding clean (and drinkable) water to human waste, then having to clean up a larger volume seems the wrong way to go. Why aren’t composting toilets or dry toilets being considered as part of the solution to our wastewater problems?

What if there was an option that residents could undertake right now that would remove their household’s contribution to the waste stream? In this blog, we’ll explore some of the innovative ways that people are turning their waste into a resource. It’s not as tricky (or stinky) as one might think…

Amy Larkin shows off her vegetable compost pile

Alchemy Farm in Hatchville, the former home of the New Alchemy Institute, is a place where the traditional meets the modern. A wind turbine from nearby Coonamessett Farm beats under a steady southwest breeze. Houses tucked into the pine trees are adorned with solar panels. Roosters crow and goats bleat.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the residents in the neighborhood have something unusual in their bathrooms: composting toilets, a method of collecting human waste and turning it into harmless, useful fertilizer.

Actually, there is nothing unusual about the bathrooms.  The Larkin family’s, in particular, smelled faintly of pine shavings.  The only noticeable difference in their composting toilet-enhanced bathrooms is the white pipe, which makes a faint whirring sound. And the subtle absence of a flush handle on the toilet.

Compost my… what?

A composting toilet: the only difference is the pipe

As Amy Larkin kindly explained, when someone uses the composting toilet, the waste drops down a tube to a Clivus Multrum storage tank in the basement. The white “stinkpipe,” seen at left, continually pulls air out of the toilet and the storage tank, removing any odors.

The fan in the pipe runs 24/7, but is powered by solar panels, which operate even if there is a power outage. Amy often cleans the fan and has replaced it twice in the toilet’s 11 years of operation. “If that fan goes, the whole house smells,” she said.

Occasionally, a user will throw some sawdust or wood shavings (in the bucket to the right) into the toilet, which helps promote the texture, aeration, and moisture of the compost.

At a cost of $6,000 to install two toilets (including labor for two men and one plumber), the composting toilets are not nearly as expensive as a sewer connection, and probably rival the cost of regular home plumbing systems. After jumping through a few hoops with the Board of Health and building department, they installed one of the first composting systems in Falmouth. Their neighbors soon followed suit.

The Larkins had enough foresight to install their composting system when they built their house 11 years ago. It would be more difficult, but not impossible, to remodel a typical Cape-style house to include one. As Amy’s husband, Jonathan, pointed out, “the limiting factor is gravity”: their house is designed around their 1st and 2nd floor bathrooms, which must be located directly over each other and the storage tank.

“That’s what we got, a two-story outhouse,” Amy said.

Muckraking can be fun

Fresh compost, straight from the chute

A composting system requires some maintenance, Amy said, but it has become part of her regular household chores to ensure the pipe is clear and aerate the compost with a rake. She estimates that she removes about 20 gallons from the tank every few months.

“I actually like it. It bothers me more to put sewage into clean water,” she said. “But it’s not for everyone. You have to be a little earthy.”

In the initial “mineralizing” phase, the waste is doused with fresh water. The liquid is then pumped out into a separate storage tank.  Aerobic bacteria and fungi break down the nitrogen in urea (the primary component of urine) into ammonia and carbon dioxide. As it passes through the compost mass, nearly all of the ammonia is converted, first to nitrites, and then to nitrates by nitrifying bacteria.

Good vs. bad bacteria

The holding tank of a Clivus composting toilet

Human pathogens are killed not by the heat within this “mouldering” composter, but by predatory organisms and the retention time they spend in the system. Phosphorous and potassium, along with a wide range of micro-nutrients, are also captured by the composting process.

According to the manufacturer, the compost liquid results is a stable, high-strength fertilizer. Fecal matter in the compost system is reduced in volume by more than 90%. When fully composted, this material looks and smells like topsoil, and is an organically rich soil amendment.

The Larkin’s system does not include red worms, but those may be added to the holding tank to transport oxygen and moisture throughout the compost mass, thus assisting the physical and chemical breakdown. Thermophllic composting systems rely on temperatures of 25-40 °C (77-104°F) to fully break down the pathogens, assisted by beneficial bacteria.

Ecological fertilizer

The remaining compost mass is supposed to be hauled away by a septage hauler, but if that step does not take into account the beneficial properties of adding the composted material to a vegetable-scrap compost pile to use as fertilizer. It also does nothing to remove nitrogen from our community’s wastewater stream. By letting soil and plants around your house absorb the nitrogen, phosphorus, and micro-nutrients, the “solution to pollution is dilution” adage is put to work.

Toilet compost may not be something you would put on your vegetable garden, but as the Larkin’s neighbors, Earl and Hilde Maingay said, “bury it 8 inches under a tree and see how well it grows.” In fact, the manufacturer advertises its composter as a way to produce a home-grown, organic fertilizer, instead of buying the energy- and chemical-intensive commercial brands, which are often made from the very same substances we flush down the toilet.