Abstract for SHOT 2009.
Many Norwegians view the leisure cabin as a way of living close to nature. Situated in the mountains, in forests, or by the sea, the leisure cabin ideally represents simple, rustic living far from the stress of modern, urban society. As a result of increased mobility and rising affluence, cabin construction exploded in the 1960s and 1970s. The higher density of the new cabin areas led to local sanitation problems. The waste problems also spread downstream and along the roads from cabin areas. The 1970s thus saw a flurry of technological development and legislative activity surrounding leisure cabin sanitation. This paper will examine how the environmental discourse on pollution informed technological changes in toilet design and vice versa.
The history of leisure cabin toilet technologies is one of alternating organic and technological processes. Leisure cabin sanitation operates under strict technological and environmental constraints. Yet, the user drive for convenience constantly challenged these constraints. Originally, the good old outhouse was the only option for cabin owners. Relying solely on organical decomposition processes, the outhouse solution required cabin owners to regularly empty the toilet and bury the waste on-site. For many, this hands-on approach was “too close to nature” to be comfortable and convenient.
In the late 1960s chemical toilets became massively popular. These were basically a bucket filled with formaldehyde, which served to stop smells and decomposition. People would, however, still continue to bury the waste outside their cabin, just as they had done with the half-composted waste from their outhouse. The environmental consequences soon became clear – the waste would no longer decompose and was often eaten by animals that were poisoned by the formaldehyde. Within a few years, most Norwegian municipalities banned chemical toilets. Cabin owners scrambled to find new alternatives, including deep-freezing toilets, incinerating toilets, discardable cardboard toilets, etc, before settling on electrically heated closed-chamber composting toilets as the most common solution. In the end, the most commercially successful toilet models were hybrids: a technologically enhanced, natural decomposition process.
The paper will analyze how cabin owners, businesses, and the authorities sought to handle this waste through technological, organizational, and legislative means. The paper will specifically discuss how changing toilet technologies solved some environmental problems at the same time as these technologies created new problems. Several different ideas of environmental risk and nuisance informed these changes. The larger context of leisure cabin development made this seemingly local and private matter of waste disposal into an issue of national proportions.