From Blank Page to Blueprint
For the full version of this article, check out our free Substack post.
Earlier this year, a team of Colorado Mesa University civil engineering students took on an unusual challenge with Toilet Equity: help design a permitted composting site for collected human excreta.
The students called their team BrownTown. Erin Brown served as Project Manager, alongside Chase Brown on hydrology and hydraulics, Nolan Morse on environmental engineering, and Alex Spink on structural engineering. They worked closely with Toilet Equity Compost Coordinator Kuiper Curtis, who has been leading our work to understand the regulations and permitting requirements involved in developing a composting site.
We checked in with BrownTown during the “messy middle,” when they were still trying to figure out exactly what they were designing. By the end of the semester, something had changed.
In our final conversation with the team, they reflected on what it felt like to go from not knowing what they were doing just weeks earlier to finishing a nearly 50-page report and a real engineering design.
They shared what happened along the way:
The moment they finally “just picked something and ran”
Why a seemingly small part of the regulations became a major design challenge
How one version of the plan ended up with five retention ponds until feedback from Toilet Equity sent them back to the drawing board
What emerged was a lesson about much more than composting. When there’s no obvious blueprint to follow, sometimes you have to put something on the blank page before you can figure out what belongs there.
Hear how questions, wrong turns, regulations, and a whole lot of iteration helped BrownTown turn uncertainty into a blueprint.
We’re incredibly grateful to the BrownTown team for their persistence and expertise on this project.
A short update: This conversation was recorded during a period when Toilet Equity was not actively composting collected material. We have since resumed composting with Delta Compost. Our board is in the process of determining whether partnering with Delta Compost will replace our own site as a long-term solution, or whether it is a temporary response while we work through the permitting process that the CMU students helped us with.
Either way, we are incredibly grateful for the work that went into developing these plans and are continuing to explore what role it could play in Toilet Equity’s future. Stay tuned to hear updates when we have them!
With gratitude,
The Toilet Equity Team
Check out the full blog post for free on our Substack, paid subscribers and monthly donors get early access each month!
This article originally appeared in our September 2026 email newsletter. You can subscribe to receive future updates here.
Comments