I have been surprised how often someone asks me about how we take care of business on our backcountry trips. So this post is to talk about our experience (without too many gross details) and how we ended up finding a solution that worked for our needs.
First off there is a wide range of options you can explore. You can go old school and dig a pit, but that takes time and in many areas this is not allowed. On the other end of the spectrum you can have a black water holding tank and a permanent bathroom built into your van, but this requires maintenance, spending time at dump stations, and winterizing the holding tank. You then have the solutions in the middle like a bucket (not kidding) and the ever popular cassette toilet. These solutions are portable, temporarily hold the waste, inexpensive, and you can dump at a dump station or any permanent toilet. By far the most common solution is the cassette toilet.
Out of all of these options my family was not going to dig a pit every time. I was not willing to deal with the permanent toilet as I didn’t want that feature permanently built into the floor plan. This is because we take lots of different kind of trips and some don’t require a toilet so a permanent bathroom in the van would be a waste of space. I also didn’t want the extra maintenance of the holding take and I especially didn’t want to be driving around with frozen human waste in the winter. The bucket options is just nasty so that left the cassette toilet which we did try. This is a good option as you can do your business in the van or move it outside when you are at camp, everything is contained in one nice package (fresh water to flush and a small holding tank), and it only costs a couple hundred for a nice model. But in the end we hated it. Even with holding tank chemicals to break down the waste and cut down on the smell……the smell was always present. And when you are driving through Utah in summer and its 90+ degrees in the van that smell can be powerful. Also when it is time to dump out the portable holding tank we ran into issues. I will spare you the details but let’s just say it is easy but not the most enjoyable experience. But given all the other options we knew about the cassette toilet was still the best option for us….until a friend of mine told me about the Wrappon Green Toilet.
The Wrappon does not really fall into any of the toilet options I have gone over. This thing has created a new toilet category “heat sealed disposable waste packets”. So what the hell is that? Glad you asked. This is a Japanese electric portable toilet that was originally designed for crane operators. It is a 19x19x19 metal box that you sit on, do your business, drop in some powder that turns your urine into gel, and then press a button to heat seal your waste in an air tight packet which you simply throw away in the trash. The way this works is that in the middle of the metal box is a long plastic bag, a motor to unroll a part of that bag to collect your waste, a heat element to close off and seal part of the bag to create a packet, and then the packet drops out the bottom for you to collect.
Because the packets are air tight there is NO SMELL. We had a family of four in Death Valley for 4 days where we used the Wrappon extensively and simply put the waste packets in our van trash can and we never noticed any smell. No joke this thing works. And since it is portable you can use it in the van or put it outside at a campsite; all you need is a power source. There are three ways to power this bad boy (120v power plug, 12v cigarette lighter plug, or a battery pack). The battery pack they sell for the Wrappon is super expensive but you can rig your own battery pack if you have basic 12v electrical skills, or you can do what we did and simply get a small Goal Zero 150 power station and use the 12v cigarette plug. Doing it this way means we can use the toilet in the van and outside with the Goal Zero with the same power plug to keep things simple.
In my eyes the Wrappon is the best of all worlds. It is portable, it is easy, it does not smell, and the maintenance is low. But it does have two draw backs, the first being price. This thing is over $800 compared to a cassette toilet that ranges from $150-$300. So I would call this a camping luxury item. The second draw back is that there is a possibility for a packet to not get a perfect heat seal. This happens for us about 1 out of every 5 times we use it. I have two theories on why this happens. The first is that the 12v doesn’t provide quite enough consistent power to the heating element to get a perfect seal. The second theory is that as you drive the van is bouncing around and the plastic bag in the Wrappon gets misaligned with the heating element. What ever the reason sometimes the seal will not be perfect and you end up with a small leak of your waste on the floor. But before you freak out keep in the mind we are talking about a small leak (like pin hole). Sounds bad I know but the fix is easy. The Wrappon comes with an align tool so if you are worried about a leak you simply realign the bag when you get to your campsite. For added protection we simply put a small plastic container under the Wrappon where the packets come out just in case there is a small leak. But honestly this is not that big of a deal as it is rare, easy to fix, and the leak is very small when it happens. It’s a small price to pay for the overwhelming benefits (at least in my family’s eyes). I do think Wrappon should address this as I am not the only person this has happened to.
To make this toilet even more useful we built a wooden cabinet around it in the van so that we can sit on it as a stool but easily remove the Wrappon when we want to put it outside. We also got a pop-up bathroom tent that we can setup outside if we are camping near other people and want some privacy but don’t want to do your business in the van. I am the first to say this is a luxury item but honestly after using the Wrappon with the family I can’t imagine ever going back to a cassette toilet.