Utilizing concepts and designs from the past several decades, the Mars Homestead Project of the Mars Foundation seeks to develop a unified plan for building the first settlement on Mars by exploiting local materials. The ultimate goal of the project is to build a growing, permanent settlement beyond the Earth.

This paper will describe the conceptual design of the waste recycling system developed to satisfy the requirements of this initial 12 person settlement.

The Waste Recycling System (WRS) consists of two major components:

• An Ecological Processing Unit (EPU) that combines biological with various physiochemical systems to process gray water and,
• A Composting System (CS) designed to process feces, food waste, inedible/unusable plant material, paper, biodegradable plastics, and material collected from agricultural and aquaculture filtration systems.

All other waste products, including industrial process, medical, and laboratory waste are handled by other means.

This paper will discuss the reasoning behind the design, the integration with the overall settlement architecture, and the mass flows and energy requirements of the system.