Protecting the environment

By choosing to use a Sun-Mar composting toilet, you continue to help the environment


Saving Water

Water is our most valuable resource on Earth, and in many places it’s getting scarce. So scarce that we can’t afford to be flushing it down the toilet.  Sun-Mar toilets use little to no water when compared to the amount used by conventional toilets. As a result, Sun-Mar toilets save a huge amount of water.

  • A four-person household using a conventional 3.5 gallon flush toilet will flush some 70 gallons of water per day down the toilet. This works out to an annual volume of over 25,000 gallons of clean water per year. That is a lot of clean water being used for the removal of waste.
  • So far, we calculate that based on our mix of residential and seasonally used units, Sun-Mar has saved a massive 3.2 billion gallons of water up to January 2008, a figure that is increasing by an amazing 6,103 gallons each and every minute.
  • Human waste is over 90% water content. Sun-Mar toilets evaporate much of this liquid and carry it back to the atmosphere via the vent system. Depending on the model, a Sun-Mar can evaporate up to 2 gallons per day. By evaporating liquids, your Sun-Mar is ensuring that no pathogens or nutrients escape to pollute your lake, river, stream or groundwater.
  • Conventional toilets allow pathogens and nutrients especially potassium and nitrogen to pollute your water. This will gradually kill a lake’s ecosystem by fostering weed growth and removing dissolved oxygen.

Nothing can beat a Sun-Mar when it comes to saving water.

Recycling Nutrients

Waste is mostly made up of moisture, and complex organic molecules. These molecules contain plenty of carbon and hydrogen atoms.

In a Sun-Mar toilet, aerobic bacteria work to break down these molecules by converting the hydrogen to water and the carbon to carbon dioxide. Both are vented to the atmosphere along with the moisture

The small amount of remaining materials are largely oxidized salts, which are collected by a Sun-Mar toilet in the evaporation chamber. This is a valuable resource which is ideally suited for uptake by plants, and typically constitutes less than 3% of the original volume of the waste.

By recycling in this way, Sun-Mar returns the nutrients to the plants they came from.