Toilets

In a pristine environment like the Dry Valleys, proper waste management is one of the top priorities. Not only do we have to carefully dispose of every tiny piece of rubbish and recycle things properly (like you all do at home, I’m sure!), we also have to deal with things normally taken care of by the modern sewage system. We collect the liquid stuff in P barrels at our field camps and take them back to Scott Base when we leave the field–just make sure the lids are on properly! We also have personal P bottles for when we’re away from camps or in our sleeping tents, and we clean them back in the P lab in Scott Base. For the more solid stuff, we have poo buckets with a toilet seat on top, which is quite similar to the hole-in-the-ground arrangement you see when you go on hiking trips in NZ when it’s set up inside a toilet tent (except it fills up a lot faster). Unfortunately, we don’t always have the luxury of a toilet tent, and in those situations it’s literally a bucket in the middle of nowhere. This also works reasonably well, provided that the sun is out and the wind is calm. Just make sure you have a big rock around to hold things down-being seen chasing a toilet seat or a roll of toilet paper with your pants down is not a picture you’d want to put on Facebook.