Public hygiene lets us stay human.  Toilet availability is fundamental and closing public restrooms an affront.  Without access to basic hygiene many people are reluctant to use parks and will drive rather than walk or use transit.  Active living, healthy aging, childhood fitness and basic health are compromised.  And people without houses cannot even wash their faces before going to work or about their daily activities.

At the January 9 meeting with Commissioner Nick Fish and PP&R Director Mike Abbaté, PHLUSH offered to help in two areas.  First, in redesigning existing toilets so they are safe and manageable.  Second, in introducing composting toilets by drawing on the expertise of our members and partners in the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance.  How is it possible that in Portland’s 11,000 acres of parkland there is not a single composting toilet?

As Commissioner Fish submits PP&R’s budget request to the Mayor and Council on Monday, January 30, one hopes that suggestions proffered by community members (see more below) have been acknowledged.  Later the same day, Laborers 483, which represents the employees facing layoffs, has organized a 3 pm Rally followed by a Forum to Protect Portland’s Future at 4 pm at the Matt Dishman Community Center where impacts of the budget cuts will be discussed.

Meanwhile, the Water Bureau continues to get national and international recognition for the Portland Loo and prepares to open Loo #5.  Water gets it.  Parks doesn’t.  Toilet users need to come out and say so.  An opportunity is the First Flush of the new Loo - with its spectacularly colorful door designed by young artists from the nearby Emerson School – at 1 pm Tuesday, January 31st  on the corner of NW Couch at 8th Avenue.

NOTE:  Below is a sampling of comments about toilet availability left on OPB’s Think Out Loud blog following Dave Miller’s January 11th interview with Mike Abbaté.

• replacing bathrooms by portapotties is a blow to the heart of how Portland lives, and what Portland is to its citizens and its visitors. 
• I expect that of all annual park users the vast majority are passive users, i.e., people who use the playgrounds, picnic, enjoy the gardens, go for a walk as opposed to participating in a structured recreation program, use pools or other community center activities. By closing restrooms, reducing trash pick up, reducing landscape maintenance you will degrade the parks experience for the largest portion of park users.
• The Park’s service math is wrong. If the equation is number served… and they are taking that number from those registering for classes or services, the math is wrong. I use the facility and don’t register for services. It is our only walking route in the area that has a public facility
• Surely keeping the parks clean and sanitary is an essential service that should be fully funded before less essential services. Also before new parks are developed we ought to be sure we can adequately maintain what we have.
• Cut management. There is no need to cut services. You can also cut some of the 3200 part-time and seasonal employees.
• ..Parks Maintenance Techs only spend a small amount of time removing trash and cleaning restrooms. There is a list of 100 other things that a Parks Maintenance Tech is responsible for…irrigation, turf, play structures, safety issues and on and on.
• convert many of the restrooms to run on solar power and use filtered rainwater for the sink, toilets and urinals. 
• When I use a public bathroom, I am grateful that we have organized ourselves as a culture to take care of this basic need. Portapotties are temporary. They are never pleasant.

Once again everybody is invited to join City Commissioner Randy Leonard and baptize the newest Portland Loo.   The celebration is at 1 pm on Tuesday, January 31st on the corner of NW Couch at 8th street, a site whose nearest neighbors include the North Park Blocks playground, the Blue Sky Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Craft, the Art Institute of Portland‘s School of Industrial Design, the brand new Old Town Recovery Center and the Emerson School, whose kids designed the Loo door.

It’s been a good week for the Loo.  The august blog of The Atlantic  goes to great pains to explain “Why Portland’s Public Toilets Succeeded Where Others Failed.”  They count the ways and even show a copy of the Loo’s patent, a first for the City of Portland.  In response, Discovery Magazine’s post “Portland’s Tips for Making Public Potties that Last” quotes an assistant to the commissioner saying  ‘There’s the loo! It’s cold and really strange inside, and there’s a sense of, ‘Wow, I’m really close to the sidewalk and people can hear me peeing,’ but it’s really cool.”  Meanwhile, an Austin journalist asks rhetorically  “Does the Portland Loo Have a Future in Austin?” , noting that “this is one Stumptown idea that doesn’t involve indiscriminate pickling or putting birds on things.”

Gonville Place Public Conveniences

That’s the title of our paper presented at the recent World Toilet Summit in Hainan, China.   PHLUSH believes that public toilets should be as much a part of the streetscape as sidewalks and street lamps. But as public restroom advocates all over North America know, it’s an uphill battle. For many public officials the best public restroom is one that’s closed.  And with concerns about vandalism, prostitution and terrorism, local authorities are closing them up.

We need facilities designed to give 21st century people privacy and safety in a public setting.  The highly gendered spaces of restrooms designed for the mid-20th century no longer work.  In our continuing research, we argue for unisex facilities which emerge from community design processes and embody Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED).

Lee Clifton of the International Code Council encouraged us to apply CPTED to public toilets.  Susan Mund introduced PHLUSH to transgender youth from a dozen universities.  They know what it is to be bullied and harassed in the men’s or the women’s rooms and are designing gender-neutral facilities on their campuses.  Elaine Scrase, an engineer on the staff of the World Toilet Organization, presented our paper in China with this slideshow overview, including photos of community-designed public toilets that meet PHLUSH Public Restroom Design Principles.

As an  all-volunteer run organization, PHLUSH relies solely on the help of dedicated volunteers to conduct outreach, plan activities, and manage online communications. So we want to acknowledge the efforts of friend and committed PHLUSH volunteer – Susan Mund.

“It is so confusing that in a world concerned with clean, accessible and affordable water, we flush it down the commode with every pee and poo,” says Mund. Passionate about the natural world and humanity, she wants to ensure that future generations will develop sustainable eco-aware sanitation techniques and have sufficient water.

Mund first heard about PHLUSH while planning the Oregon Student Association’s Northwest Student Leadership Conference (NWSLC) hosted in Portland. She invited PHLUSH presenters to speak on issues of gender-inclusive restroom design and ecological sanitation and has been involved with the organization ever since. Mund reminisces, “I stumbled onto PHLUSH indirectly and now I am a dedicated member speaking on the issues of eco-sanitation, from a layperson’s perspective, to everyone I interact with.”

A member of the board of the Community Alliance of Tenants, Mund is active in East Portland and in minority communities.  She is leading PHLUSH participation at the March Emergency Preparedness Expo 2012 and is working to have information on emergency sanitation translated into Spanish.

Mund’s detailed knowledge of legal issues, passion for social justice and change and tireless efforts to support PHLUSH make her a huge asset to the ‘smart sanitation movement’.

Visitors check out waterless toilets at PHLUSH booth

Awareness that Portland sits atop the Cascadia Subduction Zone and is at risk of a major earthquake has fueled interest in emergency sanitation.   Toilets for Emergencies is what we’re calling our fall campaign that leads up to World Toilet Day, celebrated annually on November 19th.

Visitors to the PHLUSH booth at last month’s Water! Festival had a chance to check out several waterless options .  The Christchurch Twin No-Mix Emergency Toilet is a simple, sanitary two bucket system that fits a  household emergency kit.  We are greatful to the Christchurch compost toilet group in New Zealand for showing us a solution that works well for Portland’s downtown vertical neighborhoods, most of which are built on fill and therefore especially vulnerable.  We’re proud to report that Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services passed on the design and that the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management is now recommending the Christchurch Twin.

AirHead Toilet

Other waterless toilet options on display at the PHLUSH booth were a waterless urinal donated to PHLUSH by the very green local firm Edgewater NW and an AirHead, an ingenious urine diverting composting toilet lent to us for our campaign by its creator Geoff Trott.  A simple, elegant toilet solution for boats and for wilderness cabins, the AirHead also deserves consideration as an emergency toilet, particularly in urban areas where an earthquake is likely to interrupt water and sewer service. The attractive, diminutive AirHead couples a forward urine tank and a larger waterless composting bowl with a crank flush mechanism. Here’s how it works.

Prototype hygiene station by PNCA Design Lab

Also featured at the  festival was workshop on composting toilets appropriate for post-disaster neighborhood use.  Students in PNCA’s Collaborative Design Studio reported on prototype field testing at the recent NW Permaculture Convergence.   Four hygiene stations to serve a total of 500 people were constructed of bamboo held together with plastic zip ties and fitted out with white tarps, materials that are easy to find or to store for an emergency. Each had composting toilets (for able bodied and disabled users), a waterless urinal and a water-saving hand washing apparatus.  The PNCA team is now tweaking the design and preparing a manual which will be made available free of charge in mid december.  In the meantime, check out the video of the Water! Festival presentation by Morgan O’Hara and Halley Roberts.

The East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District , whose headquarters offers a Phoenix composting toilet, did a great job organizing the festival and bringing together a so many local environmental groups, innovative products and ground-breaking ideas

Tour gateway is 14' section of Portland's Big Pipe

Where does it all go after we flush?  How does it all get managed?  How come we know so little about how wastewater treatment systems work?

These are the questions that led us to organize our 2011-12  series of expert-led tours of sanitation facilities.  As citizens, we need some understanding of essential infrastructure to influence sound budget and policy decisions regarding urban sanitation and sewers. As human beings who eat and excrete, we also see it as a matter of personal responsibility.

Columbia Operator Mike Stebbins

Our October 19, a group of us gathered at the Columbia Boulevard Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest facility in Oregon for sweepingly mind-boggling tour, certainly one of Portland’s most interesting and informative.   The incomparable Mike Stebbins, who has spent his 35 year career in operations at the plant, took us on a 2-hour-and-45-minute journey through the intricacies, mysteries and magic of the treatment process.   Mike’s career began just after the enactment of the Clean Water Act, which put an end of the old “solution to pollution is dissolution”.  Operations were still overwhelmingly manual at the time and required superhuman mental and physical strength.

In three and a half decades, Mike has helped introduce new technologies, responded to ever-tighter regulations and watched the population of the city double.   Daily flows through the plant in winter may be 25 times those of summer, when heat affects the lives of the microorganisms responsible for secondary treatment.  Today the system is so finely tuned that it can accommodate on a single winter day 430 million gallons of combined flows of household black and grey water, industrial waste, and storm water run off.

Mike’s superb analyses of failures and his delight in tweaking the systems until things work made this visit unforgettable.  We hope to repeat it next year  For a superb account of the tour, see Poolandia by Mighk of the Planet Repair Institute.

Operator Den Ferguson at the Port of Portland.

On September 25th we visited new headquarters of the Port of Portland, which has been awarded LEED Platinum Certification.  The Port’s Rachel Wray walked us around the beautiful building with views of the Columbia and the Cascades, introducing the dozens of features which contribute to making it one of the greenest buildings in the world, as this short video shows. A  key feature is the Living Machine, a state-of-the-art waste treatment facility which treats all of the building’s black and grey wastewater onsite for reuse in toilets and the building’s cooling towers.

Wastewater treatment specialist Deb Ferguson, who along with a handful of colleagues manages treatment remotely thanks to a system of sensors and computer screens, explained how the Living Machine works.  Although the Port’s offices sit atop a 3,000 space parking structure, the treatment tanks of the Living Machine are hidden beneath planters in the ground floor lobby and under the attractive landscaping that surrounds the building. Deb also showed us around the pristine new control center, a small room with pipes, filters, valves and a control panel about the size of a refrigerator.  In  “Treatment in Miniature” in the current issue of Metroscape, writer Lisa Ekman of Sewerendipity provides the fascinating details of the workings of the Port’s Living Machine.

The next PHLUSH sanitation tour is on Wednesday, March 21, 2012. We’ll tour Clean Water Services Durham Treatment Facility , which we toured with Operator Brett Laney last spring.  We’ll meet at 12 noon at 16060 SW 85th Avenue, Tigard, Oregon.  On Saturday, April 28th we’ll visit The Oregon Garden, which doubles as the tertiary treatment pant for the City of Silverton.  The Garden at 879 West Main Street, Silverton is open from 10am to 4pm.  Stay tuned for ore information on this tour, the only one which is not free.

Water Festival October 2011

From 10am-3pm there will be demonstrations on making the Christchurch twin no-mix toilet, which is appropriate for vertical neighborhoods.   At 11 am PNCA graduate students will present a class on building multi-household emergency toilets.

With alarming earthquake risk in our area, we need to prepare.  If you are interested in a 15-minute talk or hour-long workshop for your community group, just let us know.

But could no-mix toilets possibly work as urban public toilets, we wondered?  So we asked Mathew Lippincott, who’s leading PNCA’s Collaborative Design Studio on toilets, and he immediately stumbled on several dangerously unfounded assumptions in the design. First, while urine is indeed valuable, selling it won’t cover facility costs.  Second, not mixing urine and feces when using a toilet requires awareness and training; public toilets are not the place to instill such subtle behavior change. Third, using UV lights to sterilize poop and to illuminate the facility would cause eye damage!   Read Lippincott’s Note to aspiring restroom designers.

While it’s good to see San Franciscans trying to put restrooms where the public needs them, it’s okay to stick with flush toilets in heavy use downtown areas with water and sewer connections.  Hyphae Design Laboratory and the North of Market Tenderloin Community Benefit District would do well to look to Portland, where Portland Loos safely serve downtown users 24/7, and to Victoria, British Columbia, which now offers the Victoria Urinal and will soon be home to the Portland Loo. Resources on our website and the PHLUSH Public Restroom Design Principles can familiarize local communities with the options and help them make better decisions.

Hyphae Design Lab's New Public Restroom Paradigm

The Living Machine® system treats wastewater for reuse in the building's toilets and cooling tower using natural, tidal wetland-like processes.

On Wednesday, September 28th we have arranged a lunch hour visit to the Living Machine® at the Port of Portland in their new LEED Platinum headquarters designed by Zimmer Gunsul  Frasca Architects.  Thanks to the  Living Machine® none of the graywater or black water produced in the building goes into the sewer system.  This natural water purification does not generate significant sludge or methane thereby eliminating the odors and reducing the air pollution associated with conventional wastewater treatment.    The tour takes place from 11:30am-12:30pm. 7200 NE Airport Way, at the end of the MAX red line..  To sign up email info@phlush.org. Space on tours is limited.

Other tours in the series include:

• Columbia Blvd Wastewater Treatment Plant operated by the City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services.  Wednesday, October 19 at 11:30am. 5001 N. Columbia Blvd, Portland.
• Clean Water Services Durham Treatment Facility. Wednesday, March 21, 2012  12 noon at 16060 SW 85th Avenue, Tigard, Oregon
• The Oregon Garden which serves as a City of Silverton Wastewater Treatment Facility.  Saturday, April 28, 2012 10am-4pm at 879 West Main Street, Silverton, Oregon.

All tours are free except the Oregon Garden Tour, for which we’re seeking grant support.

Inventor Ken Earlywine with early prototype.

Kyle Earlywine co-owner of Green Flush Technologies writes: They say necessity is the mother of invention but even common needs such as restroom access often lack innovation. For instance, flush toilets have been the norm in households and public restrooms for longer than most Americans can remember. Yet in remote or wilderness areas without water or sewer utilities they are not feasible. A functioning restroom with flush toilets requires a drain field, septic tank, and water system. This infrastructure can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many state parks, golf courses, beaches, or other recreation areas have had to resort to porta-potties or vault latrines.

This is where the invention part comes in. Ken Earlywine, my Dad, invented a solution to this problem. His 30+ years as an engineer working for national recreation areas and forests has given him a keen understanding of the restroom problems many parks face. The most high profile problem he faced was at Lake Powell. Beach visitors were spurning porta-potties and “going” in the sand which then led to hazardous levels of human waste in the lake. Ken was charged with restoring the lake’s condition while giving visitors a more pleasant experience. This led him to inventing a solution – self-contained flush restrooms. That was 15 years ago and the lake has not had problems with human waste since. Now Ken lives in Vancouver, WA where he has redesigned his restrooms to suit the recreation areas of the Northwest. They are called Rainwater Restrooms and much like the restrooms at Lake Powell they are totally self-contained and solar powered allowing them to operate without any utility connections.

In many ways they work the same way as restrooms on trains, RVs, or airplanes. They have their own plumbing, tanks, and pumps. The big difference is that Rainwater Restrooms recycle hand-washing water, collect rainwater, and use low-flush toilets which greatly reduce the restroom’s dependence on potable water (i.e. tap water). What’s more, the average restroom “visit”, which includes the toilet/urinal and sink, only produces approximately a quart of effluent. The effluent is later pumped and treated at a facility where it can then be safely reintroduced to the environment. Even the installation is low impact. All that is needed is a shallow hole big enough to fit the base of the restroom which contains the water and sewage tanks. After water is added to the tank the restroom is ready for eager visitors.

Restrooms with water provide a comfortable user experience for the general public [in the United States]. Park and forest visitors may love the great outdoors but are reluctant to use the old-fashioned outhouse which is what makes Rainwater Restrooms such a welcome idea. It is a hybrid that can significantly improve people’s outdoor experiences in ways that protect and enhance the environment without the exorbitant cost of installing utilities. Simply put, it is the latest invention inspired by an obvious necessity.

Ed note: Our featuring this post on a local sanitation entrepreneur [who participated in the 2010 World Toilet Summit] should not imply a product endorsement.