Tag Archives: liveaboard

Advice, Article, Facts and Advice, Housing, News, Newsletter

The Poop-volution: Boaters Do It Better

Leave a comment

In law, there is no designated authority responsible for providing sanitation facilities for boaters. Unfortunately, our community has experienced first-hand that the CRT cannot be trusted to support us in this way, with poorly maintained boater facilities falling into ongoing disrepair or disappearing entirely. Wanting to avoid the weekly chore of lugging a cassette up the towpath—only to find the elsan broken—or taking a long detour to a pump-out, many boaters have turned to separating (composting) on-board loos for both ecological and convenience reasons.

Boater’s compost toilet – Image: Facebook Group/”Compost Toilets for Boats and Off-Grid Living”

Circular Revolution was born in 2021 with the aim of providing boaters with a reliable and sustainable solution to manage their separating loo ‘waste’. C.R. believes that, with the right resources, we boaters want to care for our shared environment and that, with our knowledge of the community and the waterways, we are best placed to do so. The core C.R. service collects dry material from separating loos on boats across London on a monthly or fortnightly basis by e-cargo bike and processes the amassed material into soil conditioner—transforming ‘waste’ into a valuable resource.

C.R. became a Co-operative Community Interest Company (CIC) in 2023, meaning the business is owned and controlled by its members to meet their shared needs. Their aim is to showcase to the UK that a successful, grassroots alternative to the broken-by-design traditional sanitation industry is possible—and that we boaters can be at the forefront of leading this shift.

They are also working hard to make their service accessible to all who want to use it, including introducing sliding-scale drop-off points and running a volunteer scheme where people can contribute a small amount of their time in return for a monthly subscription.

News

CRT fairness?

Leave a comment

At the Big Boaters Bash we organised in summer the NBTA London Chair, Ian McDowell did a speech and here it is below:

‘When Canal & River Trust (CRT) come up with a new policy or strategy, they have a favourite word to cover up the subtext: fairness. Safety Zones – fairness; extortionate pre-bookable moorings – fairness; converting casual moorings into restricted time visitor moorings – fairness; the licence surcharge for itinerant boaters – fairness. But who loses out each time? Who is targeted? Which part of the boating community is further marginalised whenever CRT talks about fairness? It is, of course, boaters without a home mooring.

But the subtext doesn’t stop with CRT. NBTA members & volunteers speak to a lot of people; members of other boating organisations, boaters and the public on the towpath when we are leafleting and newsletters, people at our public events and of course at events like Cavalcade where we engage with the public and aim to undermine CRT’s spin that they are some kind of beneficent society. And sometimes we are asked “what is your solution?”

What are we supposed to do to come up with this “solution”? Stop campaigning against the “Safety” Zones? Stop campaigning against the removal and monetisation of casual moorings? Stop campaigning against the license surcharge? Stop campaigning for the interests of parents who need to send their children to school, or people with physical and mental health issues who need adjustments to their expected cruising plans?

The fact is that these “what is your solution” questions are very rarely made in good faith. They are an attempt to deflect away from CRT’s attacks on our community and down a cul de sac where they can blame us for not coming up with the answers, framed within an acceptance of CRT’s claims that we are the problem. For these people, when they talk about a solution, they mean a solution to us, itinerant boaters.

So what could our reply be when we are asked about solutions? CRT need to stop blaming us; to stop marginalising us; to stop discriminating against us, and then, and only then, can we talk about the bigger picture.’