Baño ecológico - Can Monroig

As some of you may know, we have a warehouse in the countryside that also serves as a workshop. It is an old pig farm surrounded by land that we have been fixing up little by little.

This winter we spent a few weeks organising the interior of the warehouse and clearing the land around us. Over the years, a number of wild olive trees, also known as ulstres in Mallorcan, and some fruit trees have grown spontaneously. Fortunately, despite how destructive we humans are, nature takes its course. So the surprise we had when clearing our little plot of nature was very big and positive. Working there is really pleasant, even though we have a relatively close road and the noise of airplanes is a common occurrence.

In the warehouse I feel very good, relaxed, focused, very spiritual and inspired; to the point that I am developing a textile art project that I want to present in this place, but that is another story.

Booth before transformation

The conditions for spending a few hours working in the workshop were not ideal because we did not have some essential services such as running water, drainage or a bathroom. During this year 2021, due to the restrictions we have suffered due to Covid, we found that we could not even go to the nearest village bar to have a coffee and use the toilet in the process. For those of you who usually work in a closed space such as an office, this is not a problem; for those of us who work in construction, the lack of bathrooms on site is a fairly common nightmare, and if you are a woman, I won't even tell you. There are not always toilets in the houses we are going to restore, in fact, even if there are, at some point during the work that toilet will disappear. We can rent a portable toilet, but there are not always adequate accesses to be able to install them and keep them clean.

Rebuilding the shed with ecological materials

There was no toilet in our warehouse, we couldn't go to a bar, we had no septic tank or water connection. What to do?

The solution was to build an ecological dry toilet Composting. Something that is still little known in Spain but that is booming in my home country, France, either out of necessity or ecological awareness. Water consumption when using a conventional toilet is excessive, we have become accustomed to ignoring where our waste ends up or how much water we usually waste in the process.
Ecological toilets or dry toilets, also called dry toilets, do not require water to evacuate waste. They save on consumption and do not pollute. Their correct operation is based on aerobic fermentation, composting, and desiccation to degrade fecal matter.

Forged cane

To carry it out, we started from an old, existing block construction. As the appearance and the final result are always important to us, we decided to improve the construction by using lime and earth mortars to plaster the walls, a cane slab and adding a slightly vaulted flat roof to evacuate rainwater. The interior walls are finished in tadelakt and the floor in Mallorcan trispol. The toilet area is made of sandstone and recycled old wood.