Abraham Noe-Hays ’01
Coming Full Circle
By Kiera O’Brien ’18
If you’ve spent any time in the Kathryn W. Davis Residence Village admiring COA’s greenest housing complex, there’s a good chance you are more intimately familiar with the work of Abraham Noe-Hays than you realize. Noe-Hays ’00 and his company Full Circle Compost Consulting installed the waterless composting toilets that are an important feature in the Davis Village’s claim to sustainable (and largely fragrance-free) fame.
Noe-Hays has worked with dry sanitation systems since 1990. “It was kind of an against-all-odds thing,” he says, when I ask where his interest in composting first began. “I grew up with a very bad composting toilet. At some point, it became my job to maintain it.”
Arriving at COA, he thought his composting toilet days were behind him: “I was really interested in botany, because I was fascinated by plants. And then I got interested in agroecology, because you can eat those plants—and I loved to eat, especially back then. Eventually I started asking, Where does this power to grow these plants come from, apart from commercial fertilizer? How could we close the nutrient cycle? The answer? Composting.
Inspired by his studies in agroecology and botany, Noe-Hays enthusiastically threw himself into the role of “Compost Captain” of COA. Although he spearheaded an extensive “rehab of the COA composting system,” there were still days when Noe-Hays and his crew of enthusiastic compost colleagues “were told by the administration not to turn the huge piles of rotting food.” According to Noe-Hays, back in those days “the stench would just waft in waves across campus and they didn’t want it to interfere with events or donor visits.” A breakthrough came thanks to then botany professor Craig Green, who hinted to the students that perhaps they needed to add wood shavings to the mix.
Perhaps inspired by memories of the dysfunctional composting toilet of his childhood, Noe-Hays returned to the problem of composting human waste for his senior project. “I made a high temperature composting toilet processor,” he explains. “Not only did I have to figure out how to make compost out of human waste and reach high temperatures in a small volume, but I also had to figure out how to get a fair amount of human waste. I knew people who had it, but the question was how to get it from them to my compost bin.”
After convincing B&G that it was both safe and sanitary—“I got a crash course on permitting and outreach”—Noe-Hays installed wooden box toilets in the ground-floor bathrooms of the library. “It went great. I actually had so many contributions that I had to shut down the stalls and only open them two days a week.”
His senior project served as a blueprint for his composting toilet business, Full Circle, which he started immediately after graduating. It also informs his innovative work in urine recycling and fertilization, a process he has championed for over a decade as research and executive director of The Rich Earth Institute, which he co-founded in 2012 with Kim Nace. Based in Brattleboro, Vermont, Rich Earth turns human urine into fertilizer, engaging “in research, education and technological innovation to advance the use of human waste as a resource.”
He reflects, “My senior project was a crash course in running a startup nonprofit. Getting people excited about recycling their waste while managing their concerns and figuring out on the fly how to actually physically manage these systems, all while doing it safely and making a product that is useful.”
These days he balances his myriad professional titles with his role as a new parent; he and his wife Briony welcomed daughter Magdalena into the world in March 2021. When I asked how his experience with human ecology has shaped his approach to parenting, he mulled. “So far the only time it’s come up is in deciding between cloth vs. disposable diapers. Both have an impact, but I did some research. In the end we went disposable.”
