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Composting toilets, the Bronx Zoo, and design that's disgustingPosted 03.11.2007 by Dave
The flush toilet keeps humanity alive. Without toilets and sewers to carry away our poop, our waste would contaminate our drinking water, and our cities would collapse into epidemics of cholera -- just as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when skyrocketing populations overwhelmed the backyard cesspools into which they emptied their bowels. (Read the fascinating story of how humanity beat cholera in Stephen Johnson's The Ghost Map.)
But the millions of lives saved since humanity adopted toilet and sewers have come at a cost: every day we flush 108 million pounds of natural fertilizer down the toilet, while every day farmers exacerbate this imbalance in the food chain by applying 65 million pounds of nitrogen fertilizer to their land. But our sewage plants concentrate industrial contaminants and household chemicals into the sludge they produce, which means we can't reuse processed sewage even if we wanted to. In the meantime, we flush 36 billion gallons of water daily down a $250-billion dollar infrastructure built just to recover all that water we flush down in the first place. A few weeks ago, a reporter for the magazine Scienceline interviewed me about these issues -- issues that I examine in depth in my book. Last week she learned that the Bronx Zoo recently opened a state-of-the-art public bathroom with composting toilets to reduce water usage and recover waste for use as fertilizer. So on Saturday my wife and I joined Andrea the reporter to coo at grizzly bears, marvel at tigers, and check out the new facilities.
The restrooms are bright, airy, and plastered with infographics explaining the benefits of the Clivus Multrum foam flush toilets. Instead of flushing with 1.6 gallons of water, these toilets generate a biocompatible foam to lubricate the bowl and wash your waste down into the compost receptacle below. It uses just three ounces of water -- 98.5% less than a normal toilet. According to Clivus Multrum, this facility will handle over 500,000 people a year and save over a million gallons of water. (Even though this new restroom opened in November, there has been no press because the Zoo convinced all the papers to wait until Earth Day in April to publish anything. Which means this site just scooped the New York Times!) After giving the facilities a go, Andrea, Jenny, and I reconvened to discuss our impressions. All of us marveled at how nice the restrooms smelled -- not Pine-Sol good, but better, like fresh sawdust. Even though poop was busy composting in receptacles just below the toilets, and even though there were no traps or filters between the poop and our noses, the system was perfectly ventilated. The architecture was great, the place was sparkling, and everything about the experience was top-notch -- except when it came to flushing the toilet. Whenever I'm in a public toilet, my inclination is to flush with my foot. That's what my dad taught me, and the lesson stuck. No matter how clean-smelling these toilets may be, they're still public toilets, and public toilets are disgusting. No one wants to touch anything in a public toilet. And yet:
I didn't want to touch the toilet lid, which I had to move to access the flush button. And I certainly didn't want to touch the flush button -- never mind touching it twice, as the sign implores. Enlightened pooper though I may be, I can only imagine all the disgusting fingers that have been jabbing into that hole -- fingers that have just swiped toilet paper across a dirty butt, but have not yet been cleansed with soap and water. At minimum, the flush mechanism should be a traditional handle. Better yet, it should be a giant, friendly knob that you want to turn -- a fun, whimsical, sanitary interface that's in keeping with the architectural spirit of the bathroom. Not this dark, recessed, disgusting plastic button in which God knows what will surely collect. People don't like change. And people certainly don't like changing something as fundamental as the way they go to the bathroom. As one of only two points of interface between the pooper and the toilet, I worry that this flush button will single-handedly make 500,000 people a year associate the experience of ecologically-sound toilets with sticking their finger in some disgusting hole, twice. With as critical as these new toilets are to the future of humanity, that's an association humanity can't afford to make.
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