A honey bucket is a bucket that is used as a toilet in communities that lack a water-borne sewage system. The honey bucket sits under a wooden frame affixed with a toilet seat lid and may be lined with a plastic bag. These are often the same type of plastic five–gallon (19 litre) buckets used for shipping many paints, cleaners, and solvents, as well as institutional quantities of food products. Honeywagon is the traditional general term for a cart, wagon or truck for collecting and carrying excrement or manure.
Honey buckets are common in many rural villages in the state of Alaska, such as those in the Bethel area of the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta in Alaska, and are found throughout the rural regions of the state. Honey buckets are used especially where permafrost makes the installation of septic systems or outhouses impractical.
They were also relatively common in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut of Canada, but by now have mostly been replaced with indoor plumbing and sewage pump-out tanks. They are still found in summer cabins where the use of a sewage tank is impractical.
The bucket is emptied when it becomes full or smelly, usually once a day for large families and about once a week for smaller families, by carrying it by way of boardwalk or road to a nearby honey bucket well or hopper, or directly to a lagoon or sewage waste dumping location. A honey bucket well is a hole in the ground, capped with a raised wooden enclosure or none at all. A hopper is a metal container, which is removed by the city/village authority to a larger dumping area, such as a sewage lagoon.
The "bucket system" is used in rapidly developing parts of South Africa. The South African government hoped to replace this through rollout of comprehensive sanitary sewer system by 2007, but as of 2009, this had not yet been completed.