Ethnographic Insights on the Potential of Composting Toilets in Southern Chile to Sustain Life

In Southern Chile, sewer- and septic tank-based sanitation dominates public discourse and expectations, while in practice it often fails under local environmental and social conditions. This study explores the adoption of composting toilets by households as a practical response to these challenges. Drawing on autoethnographic and ethnographic research (2020–2026) in the Los Lagos Region, it examines how people implement composting toilets and the transformative potential and limits of living with these infrastructures. By situating composting toilets within global imaginaries of ecological, sustainable, and circular sanitation, it suggests that they have the potential to act as socioenvironmental cauteries—localized efforts to contain harm and sustain life. Composting toilets in this study reshape relations among excrement, bodies, and environments while depending on individual initiative, technical know-how, and social privilege. Thus, they can reinforce neoliberal rationales of individual responsibility for collective issues that ultimately require structural changes. The study concludes that just and sustainable sanitation requires support for user-driven innovations and the development of frameworks adapted to local socioecological contexts, while actively addressing social inequalities.