How many times can you mock someone living in the Sahara, because they mention their own REGIONAL shortage of water, by pointing out to them that there is plenty of water elsewhere on the planet, and think that you are making a profound argument?
Posted on 12/06/2012 7:20:37 PM PST by ExxonPatrolUs
Commode, can, the Oval Office, and the Super Bowl. Throne, pot, loo, John. The royal flush.
The toilet, in its illustrious career, has earned a variety of affectionate nicknames. But variety extends well beyond just puns when talking about those porcelain perches: Eco- friendly options, from low-flow to entirely waterless toilets, are an important part of bringing water sustainability into homes. Toilet flushes account for about 30 percent of in-home water usage, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Toilets consume more water in American homes than any other individual type of appliance, such as showers, dishwashers, and washing machines.
And with climate change, drought and demand straining fresh water resources, methods of decreasing water consumption are increasingly important to environmentalists and policy-makers. “It’s easy to think that we have this enormous indispensable water supply, that we do have about 20 percent of the world's supply of surface fresh water right here at the Great Lakes,” said Nancy Tuchman, an aquatic ecology researcher and director of the Institute of Urban Environmental Sustainability at Loyal University.
"We have the biggest supply on the continent, but it doesn’t mean that it’s going to be there forever – and especially with global climate change and all this evaporation and little precipitation that could build the water back up. So we need to conserve.” Studies show that Great Lakes water levels are dropping toward record lows.
Toilet Alternatives
One radical toilet-based solution takes water out of the equation altogether. A so-called “dry toilet” can begin as little more than a bucket filled with a layer of a carbon-rich material such as dry leaves, sawdust or newspaper. “For five bucks, or if I find a bucket and have some carbon material, I can actually build out a solution really fast,” said Nancy Klehm, who founded a Chicago-based eco-solutions company, Social Ecologies, in 2010. “It takes hardly any capital; it just takes some ingenuity and knowing what to do with it.”
After a visit to the dry toilet, users cover their wastes with a new layer of carbon- rich material. Once the bucket is full, the contents can be dumped out and composted.
Klehm organized a dry toilet trial-run for a group of 22 Chicagoans from 2008 to 2010, and she continues to work with dry toilets and composting today. For the aptly dubbed "Humble Pile" program, she collected waste from participants for a three- month period, and then composted it with more carbon-rich material for two years. “People were really surprised by how much they liked dry toilets,” she said. Participants in the aptly dubbed “Humble Pile” program liked the fact that the toilets were quiet and mobile, and that the toilets could be designed ergonomically. Most of all, they were pleasantly surprised that the toilets didn’t smell.
It's important that anyone considering a dry toilet understand how to handle the waste. "People can generally compost anywhere at anytime," Klehm said. "They just need to do it well so not to present a nuisance or attract animals."
When dealing with the dry toilet waste rather than food or landscape waste, it is important to kill pathogens from the human body by composting at high temperature created by heat-generating microbes. "Composting human waste should not be taken on unless someone is a very skilled composter," Klehm said. When done correctly, though, microbial digestion should naturally turn waste to soil and the process should be odor-free.
After the two year "Humble Pile" composting period that Klehm took on for the participants, she returned the compost to its original owners, which she said grew participant’s appreciation for dry toilets even more. “They were really excited that they were building soil," she said. “It’s a larger issue than just how much water we’re using,” explained sustainable water expert Wendy Pabich, who holds a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “When you buy a dry compost toilet, that’s all about recycling the nutrients and carbon in our waste, rather than sending them to rivers where the organic and nutrient load drive putrefaction – algal groves, fish kills and ecosystem changes.”
Dry toilets probably aren’t for everybody. “The ‘yuk’ factor is definitely there,” but that reaction is largely a cultural bias, Pabich said. She added that commercially produced dry toilets have eliminated many of the un- pleasantries consumers might expect. But there are many other, more conventional toilet options for people looking to lessen their lavatory’s environmental impact.
If every American home were to swap out old toilets for new, water efficiency- certified toilets, the EPA estimates that it would collectively save 640 billion gallons of water every year – equivalent to two week’s flow over Niagara Falls.
Toilets from before 1980 can use up to 7 gallons of water per flush, but federal regulations require that new toilets use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush. Simply by replacing old toilets, people can dramatically reduce their water consumption. And new dual-flush toilets (with one setting for wet wastes and one for solids] or low-flow toilets), marked with an EPA WaterSense label, are certified to use at least 20 percent less water than that national baseline.
A water-efficient home
In her recent book, “Taking on Water,” Pabich shared her personal experience renovating her entire home to be more water-efficient. The process involved installing meters on every water-consuming element of the house, analyzing the results, and devising ways to minimize water consumption. She chose the low-flow toilets, for instance.
Improving water sustainability at home need not be so involved for everyone, though. “I don’t think people need to go through all the effort I went through, nor to the level of analysis and understanding,” Pabich said. Instead, they can focus on a few core changes that Pablich shared in the form of a “Water Cheat Sheet” when she spoke at Chicago Ideas Week in October.
Some changes are a matter of updating home hardware. Pabich switched out her hold toilets and self-installed low-flow alternatives. “It’s not very hard, and it’s not very expensive,” she said. Toilets, though, are only a piece of the puzzle. The cheat sheet prescribes other improvements such as water-efficient washing machines and dishwashers.
Other conservation measures
requires behavioral changes, though. From eating less meat (livestock consume an enormous amount of water) to turning off the shower while lathering, small adjustments in daily routines add up. Turn off the sink while you brush your teeth, and don’t run your dishwasher until it’s full. “One thing that’s become really clear to me is the impact of our aggregate decision- making,” Pabich said. If each one of us does something to reduce our direct water use or our larger water footprint, by eating less meat or replacing our toilets, the collective impact is significant.”
The big picture: water pricing
Though individual choices have major impacts on water conservation, achieving long-term sustainability will require top-down policy changes too.
“There are clearly some major structural problems,” Pabich said. “Water is entirely underpriced, and the second that price signal is corrected I think things will dramatically change.”
Bill Christiansen, program planner for the Chicago-based Alliance for Water Efficiency, agreed. “Here in Chicago, the water rates are very reasonable, so that’s probably not going to be a motivator for lots of people.”
The city of Chicago will charge $2.89 per 1,000 gallons of water beginning Jan. 1, 2013, up from $2.51 this year. The rate is scheduled to increase again for 2014 and 2015 in increments of 15 percent. Sewer rates will be at 92 percent of water bills for 2013, but will hit 100 percent in 2015. “I think the public will be most interested in water efficiency when the need is more urgent,” Christiansen said.
People such as Klehm and Pabich promote water-efficiency initiatives, but it will take a concerted effort of people to achieve all the necessary changes.
“It requires another level of involvement in your home,” Klehm said. “So your home is not just this passive space that you retreat into at the end of the night with your carryout Chinese food and pop in a Netflix movie.”
“You have to watch the flows of all the different things that are coming into and out of your house. And there aren’t a lot of people who want to have that level of engagement in their homes.”
A combination of ignorance, smugness and environmental zealotry makes for some embarrasingly stupid grandstanding.
It's 1:30 am here for me now and I need a clear head to sytematically respond to the almost total lack of any useful knowledge of the scope of attention and analysis that goes into the design of sewage collection systems and treatment facilities.
I'll try to do a more thorough job of responding tomorrow.
I'm sure many millions of Americans (mostly Obamatons) are quite unaware of this thing called the hydrologic cycle.
My great grandmother planted pansies around her outhouse. When I was little I adored those large, lush beds of multicolored pansies. When you're 5 years old, you don't make the connection.
Not that I recycle now . . . I finally moved out of California
I know several people who have a hobby/business of digging up old filled-in privies looking for antique bottles. Some of those bottles are worth thousands to collectors. The theory is that nature has cleansed the nastiness out of the organic stuff in the hole. Most of the time, that is true.
Then I’ll s$%t in the government provided trash container. (our city owns the trash collection)
Don’t worry, I’ll roll it in to the garage first and shut the door. need a ladder to get high enough anyways.
They tried pay toilets before my time. I can only assume they went away for similar reasons.
Studies show you’ll likely NEVER recover the extra costs involved in all that fancy equipment you installed.
I had the same problem when I ran my saltwater fish store. I sold a TON of water to customers. Someone setting a new tank up would borrow my 80 gallon plastic tank, toss it in the back of their truck and fill it with RO water. Not to mention the .5-1 gallon you sent home with every fish purchase.
The RO filter however was kind of wasteful. I got it down to about 1.5 gallons waste water to every gallon of filtered water it produced.
But I plumbed that usable waste water in to 4 300 gallon cubes in the basement and the dry cleaner plumped that water in to his washers and steamers so hardly any of it went down the drain with out being used.
My landlord showed up with the first water bill he got after we moved in. man was he livid.
glad you think the problems where worked out. But what about all the people that paid good money for these perfect condition poorly designed crap catchers?
Seems a recall or good will adjustment should be made for them.
In short, the men's room - which is cleaned and scrubbed at least on a daily basis - still always reeks like pee.
I gotta tell ya, I'm not a slob, but neither am I overly fastidious. Just an average guy. If the smell in the john bothers me ... it's gotta be pretty bad.
Preach on! And Don't Get Me Started On "CFL's"! :-)
Now - I can hear my father saying "Turn off the faucet! Do you think I work for the water company?!". So - purposefully *wasting* water is foolish, too. But so-called "water saving" devices (low-flow showers that take longer to use....low flow toilets that require multiple flushes....and so on) just wind up wasting more than they save, IMO.
“San Diego is a DESERT ~ they have a severe fresh water shortage and have to pump it in from hundreds of miles away.”
You appear to have fallen for this specious rhetoric. THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF WATER, especially for a town located ON the ocean. It is only a shortage of facilities to bring water of suitable quality to the user at a price he is willing to pay.
Israel desalinates sea water and it costs less per gallon than the water I buy from a co-op utility. In both cases, the customer can have all the water the customer wants to buy.
In fact, I can go to a local convenience store and buy as much water that I want from Fiji and from Iceland. It certainly costs more, but again, the folks who sell it are happy to sell me as much as I want.
Have you tried?
I'd bet that you could make a fortune on Pay-Per-View, just from Freepers alone. But we'd need to be able to choose the government employee.
They are in the throes of coming up with a desalinization plant in Oceanside ~ actually putting the San Diego county beach to useful purposes.
The eco-nuts opposed the project.
I'm in IT too. I don't want to discuss salary specifics. Let's just say that my family is solidly middle class and leave it at that.
If you had told me back when I was 25 that I'd be making what I am now ... I'd have said "OK, sure, I believe you. I have a job, I'm a hard worker, I have a college education. That sounds like an excellent salary and certainly would be attainable."
HOWEVER ... if you had told me back when I was 25 that I'd be making what I am now .... AND needing to cut corners, shop the sales, cut coupons, shop consignment sales religiously, stop eating out, stop taking vacations, basically cut out all the fat and leave only the essentials just to stay above water ....
I'd have told you that you were crazy.
What the heck, I can't complain too loudly about my situation. I have a job and am (barely) staying above water, which is far better off than most people. The thing that bothers me this year is that, due to some large unforseen expenses over the past few months, I've cut out the charitable donations that we usually do. Mrs WBill and I just did something with our church, and that was it.
It's a small thing, I know, but it bugs me. I'm planning to try to make up for lost ground next year.
One should not let such abilities go to waste (so to speak).
I could have almost written your post myself. Near identical situations, and same reactions if someone would have told me long ago what my wife and I would be earning now, and would have thought they were nuts if I also found out it would be tough making it on that.
I believe the mad money ‘printing’ at the Fed, and reckless spending by the Congress has cheapened the dollar, and as a result everything costs more, cutting into ‘disposable income’. There isn’t much ‘fun money’ anymore.....
Why the tone? Don’t make me the enemy by pretending that I have anything to do with any of this, I’m just trying to share some hard learned knowledge.
When I say “hard learned”, I mean that because of my primitive, old school ways, I always gave a 1 year guarantee, parts and labor for every toilet that I sold.
In my world view, when a customer hired me as a plumber, then I was being hired as the expert, their personal expert, like when I hire an attorney.
If you had me install a toilet and had a stoppage, I would clear it for free, if it happened a second time within an unreasonable period, and I felt that it was the toilet, then I would tell the customer so, and tell them that I was going to try a different brand, luckily this only happened a couple of times and it was only near the beginning of the 1.6 standard.
I quickly learned to study which toilets were working, since all, of what I perceived as my own bad choice made in behalf of my customer, came out of my own pocket.
Once I had an old customer that called me to replace 3 brand new toilets from Home Depot. While having a handyman do some other work at the house, they had let him install 3 Mexican toilets from Home Depot, and they were so bad, that they paid me to replace them with my choices, and throw the other ones away.
It was a costly mistake for them, but at least they had the sense not to live with those badly designed toilets for 20 years.
I don’t know how things worked for you guys who bought your toilets from stores like Home Depot, I guess you could have inquired if there was a guarantee of some sort, maybe taken them back.
You sound like a liberal talking about solar energy, or wind.
Fresh water is not equally dispersed around the state, or the nation, or the world, and we use clean, sterilized drinking water for everything that we do.
Market forces have hindered the sell of expensive desalinated water, besides, that is only on the coasts anyway, water is still rare in place vast regions of the US.
As far as advances in technology, that goes for devices also, there is no rule that says that something has to use as much energy, or as much water, as it did at some point in the past, the problem is like you and desalination, it needs to be ready for the market and workable and cost effective, before you make it mandatory.
“”3. The Poseidon Carlsbad desalination project
Having just argued that desalination makes more sense than water transfers through the ocean from water-rich to water-poor regions, it turns out that not all desalination plants make sense. It is a proven technology – thousands of desalination plants are operating around the world – but it is a costly one to do properly. An effort by a private development group, Poseidon Resources, to build a plant at Carlsbad, near San Diego, has become the textbook case of how NOT to build a desalination plant (ironically replacing the previous textbook case of how not to build a desalination plant – Poseidon’s earlier venture with the Tampa Bay desalination plant in Florida). The Carlsbad plant was originally projected to cost around $270 million. A year ago, the costs had risen so much that Poseidon was trying to get $530 million in tax-free bonds to help them finance the project, on top of a massive subsidy from local water agencies. A month ago, they filed a new application for $780 million in tax exempt bonds, suggesting the cost is approaching a billion dollars. The company’s current estimate is that the cost of delivered desalination water has skyrocketed over the past few years to around $2000 per acre-foot, which is nearly triple San Diego’s current supply costs. And their design is still controversial because of concerns about location, environmental impacts, and financing. Moreover, the complete lack of transparency about contracts, permit decisions by local governments, Poseidon financial structure and funders, and the true economics of the plant have soured even strong proponents of desalination. This zombie refuses to die only because outside investors (either unbelievably gullible or incredibly smart) keep putting in money.””
How many times can you mock someone living in the Sahara, because they mention their own REGIONAL shortage of water, by pointing out to them that there is plenty of water elsewhere on the planet, and think that you are making a profound argument?
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