1. Caulking, preferably silicone for its flexible properties
2. Electric drill
3. Rivets and rivet gun
4. Electric grinder
5. Super tape
6. Black paint

If you don't already have these items, your local Home Depot will have 100% of them. Even if you were completely void of tooling to start with I estimate to be around $200 to buy all new tools. The Home Depot is also where we went in search of our materials to make our toilet. With the exception of the base unit, a file storage container which I found at Office Max, all of our supplies came from one department of Home Depot or another. We used a standard, but strong bucket as the "stool" (no pun intended), and a conventional toilet seat as the seat. One thing to look for when buying your base unit is to find one which has a slide opening on the side. Although it may be hard to find, this will allow for easier serviceability in the future.

Also, it is a good idea to try and find a used toilet seat, or use the one off the toilet that you are replacing as a new seat in cost relative to the other supplies and is not factored in to our total unit cost. One will also need a few small metal brackets to attach the seat to the bucket and the bucket to the base unit. We use approximately six feet of household heater hose as the vent, and a one way vent valve to keep out the rain when outdoors. The total cost of our composting toilet was $47.73. This did not take into account the fact that we had all tooling available at no charge, and that the toilet seat was donated to the project.

Our assembly time took three people around two hours. First we cut a hole in the base unit and a matching one in the bucket. After attaching the bucket we attached the seat to the bucket using the small 90* brackets. We also attached the flexible heater hose to the to the base unit using duck tape and caulking. Caulking was also used on all seams of the final product to insure an airtight seal and limit odor. Once we were done we added our mixture of 85% all purpose sand, 10% charcoal, and 5% pine needles and leaves to the base unit's sliding compartment.

Our final modification was to paint the entire thing black, which allows it to soak up the sunlight, and more quickly compost solid waste. Our creative signature was to add a newspaper/magazine holder…..a must for every composting unit. One of the mistakes we made was when we cut out the holes in the base units for the various items it became weaker and weaker, and now is a little unstable to sit on. If you want your composter to have a really durable feel I would recommend doing some structural reinforcing to the base unit.