This wooden toilet is so chic, you might not want to poop in it

In the bathroom, porcelain has had a long reign. But for all its strength and durability, porcelain is a high-firing clay. With temperatures that can reach 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit, its process emits a substantial amount of CO2 emissions and requires a lot of water.



Enter Woodio, a Finnish company that, true to its name, makes sinks, bathtubs, and toilets made of wood chips, combined with resin and the same kinds of bio-based additives used to make boats. Woodio claims that those materials, compared to porcelain, generate 99% fewer emissions—but is that enough to get people to sit on a toilet made of wood?



[Image: Woodio]



It all started with a mad idea to make bathroom tiles out of wood. But the company quickly realized how saturated the tiling business was, and pivoted to washbasins and toilets instead. After three years of R&D and prototyping, Woodio launched its first wooden sink in 2019. Then came bathtubs, and just last year, toilets, which in March 2023, won a German design award. Today, the company counts about 30 units in its portfolio, including various shapes of sinks and a wall-mounted toilet (a floor-standing version is coming soon). Woodio’s CEO, Petro Lahtinen, says the company has sold about 10,000 units so far, with customers often buying all three in the same color, which signals that people are treating the composite material as their new bathroom palette.



[Image: Woodio]



To make the products, Woodio has devised its own molding technique, which allows the team to compress the materials at the same time they inject them. “It’s pretty difficult to handle porous materials like wood in the casting process, so we have special molds that can handle natural materials,” says Petro.



[Image: Woodio]



But first, the company must collect the wood chips, which it buys as a waste stream from local sawmills and paper mills. Back at its factory in Helsinki, the wood chips are sifted and dried; and for the colored versions, stained using regular wood stains. Then, the ground wood chips are mixed with resin and additives and poured into the custom molds.



[Image: Woodio]



Once the casting is completed, the team performs the usual sanding, polishing and drilling for pipes, then coats the product with a food-grade, dirt-repelling coating like the one used on kitchen countertops (and with no forever chemicals involved).



But what happens when you clean the toilet? Lahtinen says that the final coating and bio-based additives make the Woodio composite surface completely waterproof. “You can use normal detergents,” he says, adding that the material’s composition, which he describes as a “3D mesh” of wood chips that act as fibers reinforcing the resin, is actually more durable than porcelain: “You can hit the sink with a hammer, it doesn’t break, not even a scratch.”



[Image: Woodio]



And when the toilet does reach the end of its lifespan, or when it’s time for a retrofit, the entire thing can be ground up, then mixed with new wood chips to make a brand-new Woodio toilet.



If the product can indeed withstand the test of time (and harsh cleaning products), it may well disrupt the bathroom industry, which—save for recent forays into the chromatic—has long embraced stark white, glossy porcelain. But first, it has to convince enough people that wood does, in fact, deserve a prime spot in the bathroom.