Worthington Water Closet

Worthington Construction Ltd. (WCo.), which has been providing construction services in the residential, industrial and agricultural sectors since 1979, is expanding its business offerings by developing and manufacturing an innovative, off-grid, portable washroom product, the Worthington Water Closet (WWC). The WWC is uniquely designed and uses multiple sustainable-building technologies, including desiccating bio-digester technology, rainwater harvesting, solar-thermal heating, solar electricity and battery storage, and pre-manufactured envelope techniques for increased construction efficiencies. In 2015, WCo. received support from the Natural Resources Canada, Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP) to fabricate two WWC prototypes and trial them within two different markets. One prototype was tested in Edmonton, Alberta at the Victoria Golf Course throughout the 2016 golf season; the other was tested for seven months at a large-scale PCL Construction site in Calgary’s northwest community of Rocky Ridge. This prototype underwent performance monitoring and testing by the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology’s Green Building Technologies (SAIT-GBT) research group. Performance results, lessons learned and a user-experience analysis from SAIT-GBT’s monitoring program proved the effectiveness of the innovative and sustainable WWC design.