Portland State University student Kate Washington has chosen to partner with PHLUSH in carrying out research on the relationship between public restrooms and public transit, specifically whether public toilet availability encourages ridership. To this end she has launched the Portland State University 2013 Public Toilets and Transportation Survey.   Portlanders are urged to spend a few minutes taking the 20-item survey before June 12th and to share it with their friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues.

Currently completing a BA in sociology, Washington is a PSU Master’s candidate in Urban and Regional Planning who was honored this year as a McNair Scholar.  The prestigious McNair Scholars Program helps first-generation, minority, and low-income students move into advanced study.  Awardees benefit from privileged contacts with senior researchers and graduate assistant mentors. During the nine-month program, they complete research projects and build professional portfolios.

The US Congress established Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program to honor the African American physicist and astronaut who was killed in the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle accident.  The program enables students who might not otherwise have access to the connections and research experience necessary to get into graduate school, to expand their educational opportunities by enrolling in a Ph.D. program and ultimately pursuing an academic career. This program is dedicated to the high standards of achievement inspired by Dr. McNair’s life.

PHLUSH is delighted at this opportunity to support Kate Washington as she systematically addresses an issue for which we currently have only anecdotal evidence – the relationship of transportation choice and available amenities along the route.   We look forward with anticipation to the results of the extensive research of which this survey is a small part and to reporting them on this website later in 2013.

Please take the Portland State University 2013 Public Toilets and Transportation Survey  

This week the Portland Hilton is buzzing with the energy of hundreds of impassioned volunteers and salaried colleagues who manage the nation’s most important disaster response agencies. It’s the annual conference of National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster a coalition of hundreds of organizations – faith-based, community-based, and other non-governmental organizations – and 55  VOADs representing them in U.S. States and Territories.

There are a few suits in the crowd, such as David Myers of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, but mostly conference attendees have arrived with their sleeves rolled up. In golden sweatshirts with maroon crests are the Adventist Community Services Disaster Response teams. Crisply attired in blue short-sleeved shirts are members of the Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation. Women and men of the Salvation Army are in uniform with top brass in double rows of buttons and deep-red epaulettes. Skullcaps and hijab are the order of the day for Muslim delegates from INCA Relief USA.  Name badges and logo-ed shirts introduce folks from nationwide chapters of Lutheran Wold Relief , the American Red Cross, and the United Methodist Committee on Relief.

All of these dedicated people are here to exchange lessons learned in responding to calamities such as Superstorm Sandy, the West Texas fertilizer plant explosion, the Boston Marathon bombings, and dozens of other emergencies we rarely hear about (such as the series of disasters that befell West Virginia in 2012). Over the five days of the conference, participants will lead each another in trainings, meet in committees, and push the edges of innovation in everything from traditional logistics to information technology for volunteer management in emergency situations. Even the conference app echoes the originality, sophistication, and ingenuity of these collective efforts.

PHLUSH is participating at the invitation of Oregon Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters – the conference organizers. Recently they noticed our work in emergency sanitation and saw that it fit a gap in available technologies. When we were offered a free exhibit booth, we were ready thanks to a small grant from East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District to create a portable display (see photo to the right). Based on A Sewer Catastrophe Companion, edited by Molly Danielsson and Mathew Lippincott of MDML, the display includes four panels edited by the PHLUSH team and designed by Doug Katagiri. Integrated in the exhibit are used food containers from which households and neighborhoods can fashion functional waterless toilets. See this brochure to learn how to build your own. Following this national premiere, this empowering and informational display Restorative Sanitation: Why wait until disaster strikes?  will circulate to sites throughout the EMSWCD district and beyond.  Groups interested in hosting the self-explanatory display on restorative sanitation are invited to contact PHLUSH.

Nothing says community like a bucket brigade. Chains of neighbors passing buckets have put out fires and saved their towns. Buckets of rubble passed hand-to-hand have enabled rescuers to reach survivors of earthquakes and landslides.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we have an earthquake in our future. Experts say water and sewer services will be interrupted for months or years. Now a group of Portland volunteers is making sure that people are prepared. The Twin Bucket Brigade is getting the word out about emergency sanitation. Drawing on the experience of the resourceful people of Christchurch, New Zealand, they are taking the Twin Bucket Emergency Toilet from neighborhood to neighborhood, meeting to meeting. They pass out leaflets, and engage their neighbors around the question “What do you do with the pee and poo?”  Their message? Collect buckets and know why and how to separate pee from poo and what to do with each in an emergency.

New binder has info helpful to volunteers

This system has been endorsed by the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management.

Individuals, neighborhood associations, civic groups, school teams and scout troops are invited to join the Twin Bucket Brigade. A current Brigade member can give a short orientation in person, by video conference. or even by phone. You can borrow an exhibit kit or put one together yourself.

Included in the portable exhibit kit are nested pee and poo buckets, various lids including a toilet seat, sandwich bags with samples of carbon composting material, a plastic rack for how-to leaflets, a sign, a table cloth, a clipboard sign-up sheet, and a volunteer manual.

Everything you need fits in or on nested buckets.

The Twin-Bucket Kit Checklist lists contents can be assembled for $10 -$50 depending on how many recyclables you can find. An Information for Presenters binder includes includes Presenter Guidelines and a template for the Twin Bucket Emergency Toilet Leaflet that you can personalize with your logo or that of a sponsor. There’s also a Bucket Brigade rack card, an tent card sign for the exhibit, a sign in sheet, a bibliography of useful resources on resilient sanitation and a list of addresses of physical and online sites where you can find parts and supplies. (This is imilar to the regularly updated page on the PHLUSH site). If there are technical questions that Brigade volunteers cannot answer, people are invited to email questions to the team at PHLUSH.

How about joining the Twin-Bucket Brigade? Get in touch with PHLUSH to schedule a brief orientation and borrow a kit. If you live in one of the twelve neighborhoods served by Neighbors West-Northwest, contact Jen Kirk to check out a kit from their office at 2257 NW Raleigh St, Portland.  If you live in one of the twenty neighborhoods served by Southeast Uplift, contact Jay Derderian.

Public restrooms have always been on the leading edge of the fight for human rights.  Never has this been more true than now for transgender folks. But as Campus Progress notes with dismay, hateful discrimination against them may soon be protected under Arizona Law. State Representative John Kavanaugh‘s most recent bill is on its way to a full vote in the Arizona House. If it passes, businesses will be able deny toilet access to non-gender-conforming individuals and be exempt from discrimination lawsuits.

Oregon high school reserves six restrooms for transgender students. The delicate trickiness of restroom choice for transgender people is covered nicely in a front page story in The Oregonian.  Portland Public School’s Grant High has recently designated six unisex restrooms to serve students who feel uncomfortable and may be subjected to bullying in traditional men’s and women’s rooms.  Writes  journalist Nicole Dungca, “Oregon is relatively ahead of the nation in terms of protecting those who identify as transgender. The state passed the Oregon Equality Act in 2007, and it joins at least 15 other states and Washington, D.C., in offering some legal protection for transgender people.”  (Note that since 2008 PHLUSH has been promoting unisex stalls for their efficiency, safety, comfort, and ease of cleaning.)

The Bathroom Stall Project   Men’s and women’s behavior in washrooms is guided by social codes that vary radically by sex.  For women the stall is an almost sacred place for privacy, reflection and confession.  A Canadian academic who got in the habit of taping up notes in reply to grafittied despair, is now encouraging others to do the same, resulting in silent, anomyous bathroom dialogues.

Boys deserve the same right to privacy as girls.  A Minnesota mom writes an op ed that brings a new dimension to the issue of restroom safety for children.   Men’s rooms offer a line of urinals with at best tiny partitions between them while women’s rooms are all stalls.  Should males enjoy the same privacy as females?

Toilet matron becomes town’s first librarian.  Writing in the Daily Astorian, Seaside, Oregon librarian Ester Moberg recounts the entwined history her town’s library and public restrooms.   A structure built in 1913, in the age of the first fine public toilets, featured an area with a reading table, which eventually became the public library.  The matron in change of the restrooms soon was manning a large room where patrons could read or check out materials.  (Note that today’s librarians still play an important role in ensuring that the general public has access to restrooms.)

Public toilet afterlives.  The big public toilet die off started in the mid-20th century, and for many locations it was a long neglected agony.  But now these interesting historic structures are taking on second lives.  In this video, the BBC  reports on the afterlives of several of London’s estimated one hundred abandoned public toilet.   The Attendent in London features gourmet salads and sandwiches among 1890 Doulton & Co urinals.  Another historic London venue serves as a cat café, patterned after some 100 feline-staffed facilities that serve Tokyo apartment dwellers whose buildings do not allow pets.  Another new destination in the UK will be a café gallery installed in a restored Art Deco structure in Waterloo’s Marine Crescent Park.

Talking urinal cakes help Michigan battle drunk driving    Yes, that is the headline and here’s the story.  Wild innovation meets a serious  problem.   Paraphrase won’t do it justice so read this.  

It’s the Law in China:  Count flies and rank rankness.  While a  national toilet policy may seem like a good thing, it will be interesting to see how China’s intriguing “one fly” rule works out.  Toilets will be uniformly inspected to determine if there is more than the one fly per square meter allowed in a bathroom inside a building, and the three flies per square meter permitted in a free-standing bathroom.

Restroom spying uncovered in Florida.  In a fairly creepy story, a Fox news team has documented dozens of toilet stalls with spy holes, including at Jacksonville International Airport, a university library and a popular shopping mall.   How did the reporters find them?  Through a specialized  an internet site.

Every year on World Water Day, PHLUSH joins local groups to highlight global water issues that impact sanitation and hygiene.  This year’s celebration is a special screening of  Last Call at the Oasis at the Clinton Street Theater on March 22 at 8pm.  Look for us along with Green Empowerment, El Porvenir and our waterless Twin Bucket Emergency Toilet.   Jenn Evon of El Porvenir has contributed this guest blog post.

Photo credit: Forest Woodward

For 46 years, Ana Rosa Delgadillo walked 2-4 kilometers every day to neighboring communities to get water. Twice a week, she took her family’s clothes to wash. She often waited up to 3 hours for her turn to wash. On clothes washing days, she and others left at 1 AM with bags of clothes and food for the day. They would return 15 hours later, in the late afternoon. Some days Ana and the other women were turned away and not allowed to get water.

“This water situation was like a punishment,” says Ana. “We felt that our situation was never going to change.”

Worldwide 780 million people live like Ana: without access to clean water. And 2.5 billion of our fellow human beings don’t have a toilet.  On March 22^nd, the Clinton Street Theater, El Porvenir, and Green Empowerment present the documentary Last Call at the Oasis to raise awareness of the global water crisis and celebrate World Water Day. Purchase tickets to this critically acclaimed film with Erin Brockovich and Peter Gleick online here by Friday March 15th. Roger and Lani Jo Leigh, owners of the Clinton Street Theater, have been incredible supporters of El Porvenir for the last decade.

El Porvenir is an international nonprofit organization that empowers rural Nicaraguans to improve their living standards through the sustainable development of water, sanitation, and reforestation. Since 1990, El Porvenir has worked with 120,000 Nicaraguans to build water and sanitation projects, reforest their micro-watersheds, and learn about health education. El Porvenir is proud to have many active supporters in Portland. Since 2003, over 150 people from the Portland area have traveled with us to work alongside Nicaraguans on water, sanitation, and reforestation projects.

Access to clean water and our quickly vanishing water resources are pressing issues that resonate with our supporters and us.  Ana’s story has a happy ending: “Now I can bathe using water that is close by, and my family has its own latrine.  With these things, I feel like the queen of my home.”

Join us on World Water Day to celebrate the powerful change that comes when communities gain access to clean water and sanitation.

A guest post on toilet cleanliness and toilet use by Thomas Levine from thomaslevine.com.

Sitting Toilets

Western sitting-style toilets are presumably intended to be used in a seated position, (McClelland & Ward, 1982) except when used by males for exclusively urination. A sign on a bathroom in my college dorm illustrates this expectation. But the word on the street is that people often adopt a hovering posture instead of the seated posture in order to cope with unsanitary toilets. To start, several threads on Yelp contain discussion and complaint about toilet cleanliness and preferred postures. Also, one person admitted to PostSecret that he or she hadn’t sat on a toilet for the four years. “I haven’t sat on a toilet seat in over 4 years.” This sparked further discussion on PostSecret forums.

There’s even a website that reviews toilets and tells you whether to Sit or Squat. Greed (Greed, 1995) and Moore (Moore & al, 1991) anecdotally found that young ladies are often taught that hovering is proper and that sitting is unclean. Several WikiHow articles provide examples of this phenomenon. Formal quantitative studies have found hovering to be common among Taiwanese people (Cai & You, 1998), British gynecological outpatients (Moore & al, 1991), and American university students.

Toilets get dirty, so people hover.

The three studies I just mentioned, particularly the third (mine), also suggest that toilet cleanliness affects posture choice, with dirtier toilets encouraging non-sitting postures like hovering that make the toilet dirtier. Many of the referenced forum discussions explain that hovering, rather than sitting, creates more of a mess. Presumably, this is because hovering puts the relevant body parts in a less stable position that is higher above the toilet, making it harder to aim. The discussions and formal studies indicate that people are more likely to hover as toilets get dirtier, in order to avoid touching the dirty toilet. Thus, the clean toilet is an unstable equilibrium of a toilet’s sanitary state; toilets get dirty, so people hover, so the toilets get dirty, so people hover. In other contexts, this cycle is sometimes termed the “broken windows theory”, or the feeling of “maintenance” of a space.

Effects of privacy on posture choice.

Public toilets tend to be dirtier than private toilets, or people or we may at least be more concerned with sanitation at public toilets than at private toilets, so we might expect that a more public toilet would effect posture similarly to how a more dirty toilet would. On the other hand, privacy might have a secular impact on posture choice. We don’t have a clear idea of whether privacy affects posture choice for reasons other than cleanliness, but here are two things that I think are relevant. First, social norms might have more of an impact in public toilets than in private toilets. A lady once told me that she thought people would be more likely to hover at public toilets because hovering is considered more proper than sitting; since people can see others’ feet and lower legs under the bathroom stalls in public restrooms, people might be more likely to follow this convention of hovering in public than in private. Second, people might trust the cleanliness of toilets more when they know who has been using it. Before I see a private toilet, I generally trust that it is clean enough because only a specific group of people uses it. Because these people know each other, they can shame each other if the toilet gets dirty, so I trust somewhat that they will keep it clean. Also, if I know the people and think that they are reasonably clean, I trust that they would keep the bathroom clean. I do not have the same trust in a public toilet; any manner of anonymous crazy person might have used the toilet without being compelled to keep it clean.

Considerations for toilet.

Toilets are called “sitting” toilets, but lots of people hover, even in the most desirable of conditions. Something is wrong here; the design and conventions of toilets do not match the way that toilets are used. If people want to hover, maybe we should let them hover. Would adding bars to stalls help people hover? And would that, in turn, make people happier? Maybe we can make toilets fit a wider range of people. Men have the luxury of calmly standing while urinating, whereas women have to either hover or bear touching the seat. Could toilets be designed in some way that matched the female anatomy? Clara Greed (Greed, 2003) might give us ideas. More generally, can we design healthful toilets that still align with our cultural expectations? Alexander Kira (Kira, 1976) has ideas on that. The insistence on hovering over a public toilet can also be seen as a silly obsession with cleanliness. Sitting on the public toilet is probably perfectly safe, and hovering is known to have undesirable health outcomes, like taking longer to pee (Moore & al, 1991). Can we just get over our concern for such cleanliness? As an aside, we should consider squatting. Among other benefits, it might make peeing faster. (Amjadi & al, 2006; Rane & Corstiaans, 2008) On the other hand, it might not. (Unsal & Cimentepe, 2004)

Keeping toilets clean.

Without changing our toilets, maybe we can keep them from getting dirty or from seeming dirty. Knowing that dirty toilets promote hovering and, in turn, dirtier toilets, we can schedule bathroom cleanings more efficiently. Rather than cleaning bathrooms once a day or waiting until they get messy, we could quickly tidy them up every hour or so; wipe the toilets and the sinks, pick trash up from the ground, and flush any toilets that haven’t been flushed. This may stop toilets from getting particularly dirty, allowing toilets to stay reasonably clean throughout the day without major cleaning. We can also install signs in the bathroom that encourage people to clean up minor messes. When I was in my senior year of college, the cleanliness of my dorm’s bathrooms became a topic of epic controversy. Around that time, I observed a couple signs that requested that men avoid getting urine on the toilet seats and that they wipe the toilet in case they did get urine on the toilet.

Here’s a notice phrased in a way that is somewhat hostile towards males; it might be more effective if they requested that less unpleasant unsanitary conditions be avoided. Based on the results from the present study, I suspect that the prevention of minor messes that people don’t complain about would prevent the major messes that people complain about. There was one sign in my dorm that made this sort of request.

Making public toilets more like private toilets.

If public and private toilets really encourage the use of different postures, we could try making public toilets feel more private. Here are some ideas based on my hypothesized reasons for this hypothesized effect. Public toilets might encourage people to follow social norms more strongly because people in the bathroom can hear each other, smell each other and see each other’s feet. If stalls were made more enclosed, people might be less concerned about the social norms. People might trust the cleanliness of public toilets more because people aren’t shamed when they make a mess. If we station an attendant at the bathroom, people might feel more ashamed of making a mess, and people might thus trust that people aren’t being too messy.

Different people use toilets differently.

Ignoring the reasons why people choose posture, we still see wide range in choice of posture for toilet-use. The various formal studies suggest that:

• at least half of British and American women usually hover in public toilets.
• American males usually sit or stand.
• Chinese people often squat on sitting toilets, with their feet on the toilet seat.

The anecdotes and toilet use directions tell us about some other postures, like standing for females, and show us the varied complex posture decision processes that people use. I’ve discussed how different sexes choose different postures, but loads of other personal characteristics might affect the posture that makes sense. For example, height matters (Cohen, 2009).

Talk about toilets.

People don’t talk about toilets, so it’s easy to think that everyone uses them the same way you do. At a more fundamental level, this may explain many of the problems with them: People don’t think much about toilet design in general, and when they do think about toilets, they don’t think about how different people use toilets differently. The use of toilets is about as varied and complicated as anything else, but social norms discourage us from discussing this complexity. I think we’ll get somewhere if we make the discussion of toilets seem less weird.

Maybe we give a buck to that houseless veteran standing on the corner. Perhaps we donate to the annual holiday collection for families struggling to make ends meet. But how many of us would give up a lucrative career to dedicate our lives to those in need? Trevor Mulaudzi, that’s who. He once was a professional geologist working in mines in South Africa, but he suddenly decided to leave his job in 1996 to clean toilets in schools across his country.

Trevor and his family.

Often when driving to work, he would see children in the streets at 10 am. As a father, he wondered why these children were not in the classroom. “The toilet are all dirty. We cannot use them.” the kids said. To use toilets they would go to taverns instead. He thought: “Now if I am the only person or parent who is aware of that and I don’t do anything about it, what type of citizen will I be in the country with my education and my passion to help children?… That’s when I started cleaning up the toilets.” He quickly arranged for a visit of school facilities, and he found some of the filthiest toilets you can imagine. Many toilets in South African schools were in disrepair from a lack of funding for janitorial staff and toilet paper. In some cases, students using makeshift toilet paper were accidentally clogging toilets.

Mulaudzi went home and thought deeply about the issue. He called a cleaning supply company for assistance. They graciously sent an employee to show him proper toilet cleaning techniques in schools, “how to dress protectively, how to disinfect the place before cleaning or else you will get sick.” He also learned how to clear deeply clogged toilets with a trowel. And he didn’t run away. A mere twenty-four hours later he submitted his resignation as a geologist. He soon visited other schools and found similar problems. In a month, he registered a business called The Clean Shop. His goal was to have schools help contribute to funding the business. But school’s didn’t have budgets. So Mulaudzi came up with Plan B.

He raised funds selling cleaning products and used the income to grow his professional toilet cleaning business. The Clean Shop grew from four people in 1998 to over 450 people in 2009. They worked on large-scale contracts, and Mulaudzi used all profits, combined with charitable donations, to clean toilets in hundreds of schools across the country. He also taught students and teachers how to maintain toilets and raise money.

Mulaudzi didn’t stop there. Now he wants to teach new sanitation techniques to communities. He’s partnering with Swedish scientist and educator Jan-Olof Drangert to launch a program called the South African Water and Sanitation Academy. He will teach people about toilet maintenance and ecological sanitation technologies. Information about these new technologies can be found on Drangert’s website Sustainable Sanitation for the 21st Century. Closed-loop sanitation technologies that recycle rich nutrients in pee and poop are more ecologically sound than traditional systems. And since they don’t require water or sophisticated plumbing, anyone can build and use them.

In case you’re wondering, the kids in the schools started calling Mulaudzi Dr. Sh*t because he was improving their health by teaching them how to keep toilets clean thereby removing the thousands of pathogens found in poop. And this toilet angel is bound for heaven with all the good works he’s doing. We can all learn a lesson from his story. Don’t be afraid to do what we know is right. Take risks to make big changes. And never forget the power of laughter. For more information or if you’d like to be more involved in this project, please contact Trevor Mulaudzi at trevor [at] thecleanshop [dot] co [dot] za

Reading The Bathroom: Small Spaces, Vast Systems published in Places by Dr. Barbara Penner, senior lecturer at Bartlett School of Architecture UCL, challenges one to think beyond the status quo for global sanitation design of toilets, hygiene, and sewers. Penner is not your typical architect. She pushes disciplinary boundaries to decipher historical and sociological elements of design, challenges inequality in mainstream design formats, and has a special penchant for toilets. She has already written and contributed to several pieces about toilet spaces including: Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, Gender Space Architecture, and Toilet: The Politics of Sharing. She is currently working on Bathroom, a Cultural History of the Bathroom (forthcoming).

Penner begins The Bathroom detailing her visit to the famous artist-designed public bathrooms at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin. She questions why humans covet toilet privacy but often fail to remember the pipes which connect us to a greater water and sewer whole. “Small rooms, big systems,” she says. Using the example of historical bath-houses, she posits the transition of communal to fiercely private washing, bathing, and toileting was rooted in the rise of the bourgeoisie and industrialization. Further, she examines why the water-based toilet as an idolized model has spread globally: “For the story of how western bathrooms came to be locked in is not only a story of trade but also a story of empire, colonial expansion and war.” Such systems might meet needs of some people [those able to afford expansive infrastructure and who culturally embrace sitting instead of squatting], but not all [those in water-scarce areas or with alternative approaches to toileting].

While Penner broaches solutions for design of dignified and equitable sanitation systems, she talks mostly about the cultural, historical, and technological development of toilets throughout her essay. She fervently and rightly believes toilets are a human right and people should be included in development of their own sanitation systems. But perhaps a bit more background about the science behind waterless systems versus water-based systems could enrich the debate. Nevertheless, she expertly encourages all readers, all Westerners, and all people to think more about our built environments to ensure oppression is not occurring vis-à-vis design. She champions dual underdogs: the toilet and the Other. The Bathroom: Small Spaces, Vast Places is a must read for anyone interested in community development, social equality, or water and sanitation provision.

Welcome to the PHLUSH liveblog of the World Toilet Summit 2012. PHLUSH volunteer Abby Brown is liveblogging the event from Durban, South Africa on December 4 to December 6. Click Read more below for the latest updates. The event program is located here. [Please remember the time difference - Durban is ten hours ahead of Oregon.] If you want her to cover a specific topic, please leave a comment on this post. Happy reading!

We’ll be at the Random Hacks of Kindness event in Seattle, participating in Toilet Hackers. Researching sanitation is a passion of ours, so we, Molly and Mathew, thought we’d put together a very rapid rough history of sanitation in the US, Canada, and Western Europe in the past 200 years.  There’s a stack of citations below, but the general thrust of this history can be credited to Joel A. Tarr’s essay Water and Wastes  and the 1979 National Science Foundation report he chaired, Retrospective Assessment of Wastewater Technology in the United States, 1800-1972.

Oxygen is bubbled into to tanks of sewage to encourage soil bacteria to devour the nutrients in sewage. Keeping soil bacteria alive in water is energy intensive.

Piped water service began in the early 19th century before sewers were used for anything other than stormwater drainage. Convenient water that didn’t have to be hauled from a shared pump led to a 10-fold increase in water consumption that overwhelmed infiltration and open drainage systems. Worse, wealthier urbanites installed flush toilets. This new, unanticipated technology started overflowing the cess pits that otherwise contained undilute excrement that could accumulate for years without having to be emptied (facts and figures below). Sanitary sewers were built to mitigate overflowing sewage and eliminate the health risk related to the threat of disease from miasmatic sewer gas. These sewers failed to stop the spread of typhoid, increased its infection rates downstream of sewer outlets, and the miasmatic gasses they were designed to mitigate turned out to not exist.

Legal changes during the 18th and 19th centuries encouraged the industrialization of rivers as UK and US common law shifted from a “prior use” to a “beneficial use” doctrine of natural resource allocation, leading inadvertently to heavy industrial pollution by the early 19th century. Pollution was seen as inevitable and recovering a clean drinkable river an impossibility, so in the late 19th century cities invested in drinking water treatment instead of sewage treatment and an end to river dumping of industrial waste. The decision was made to let rivers become open sewers. Treated drinking water, not toilets and sewers, stopped epidemic enteric disease.  Mortality rates juxtaposed with sewer construction mileage demonstrate this point most clearly in the well documented cases of Paris, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Trenton, and Toledo, and sketch a similar picture in other cities.

Clean, treated drinking water took the wind out of the sails of nascent environmental initiatives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and untreated sewage discharge steadily increased until the 1950′s and 1960′s when legislation such as the Clean Water Act and its many local precursers lead to the construction of wastewater treatment plants. Since the 1970′s the US, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan have been doing an excellent job of keeping diseases out of waterways, are doing better than any other industrialized areas at pollution control, and are even doing better than most non-industrialized areas too.

Despite the quality of our sanitation systems, our path to them was not direct, not based in good science, and did not lead to the benefits so often ascribed to toilets and sewers.  As the rest of the world works on sanitation, copying our history is probably a bad idea.

Arguments for and against flush toilets and sewers are the same now that they were when construction really got going in the 19th century.  Presented below are the 6 major reasons for and against water-carriage of waste debated in the 19th century, presented almost verbatim from Tarr.  Bullets are our contemporary evaluations of these issues given current knowledge.

For water carriage of waste:

1. Capital and maintenance costs of building sewerage systems would represent a savings for municipalities over the annual costs of collection under the cesspool-privy vault scavenger system.

• Tarr believes this was probably true, although numbers are hard to come by for the costs of comparable collection systems.

2. Sewerage systems would create improved sanitary conditions and result in lowered morbidity and mortality from disease;

• Despite what British doctors believe, this never happened.  Sewers caused mass typhoid epidemics in their own cities and downstream, see the Tarr and Sutcliffe citations.

[2a] such savings could often be translated into financial terms, further stressing the economic benefits to be obtained by adoption of water-carriage technology.

• This is true– modern sanitation is a great public health value, returning more than $7 in savings for every dollar invested.

3. Because of improved sanitary conditions, cities that constructed sewerage systems would grow at a faster rate than those without by attracting population and industry

• This worked, they grew rapidly see Against [3a] below.

Against water carriage of waste:

1. Water-carriage removal would waste the valuable resources present in human excreta that might otherwise be used for fertilizer.

• Mined guano fertilizers and later synthetic fertilizers kept fertilizer prices low and replaced soil nutrients. Only in East Asia was the fertilizer market strong enough to pay for human waste collection, in Europe it was a bust.  Alternatives to water-carriage, such as short-lived Dutch vacuum sewers, intended to pay for themselves through fertilizer sales but were almost never profitable and the economics still don’t work in industrial economies.

• The end of cheap, extractable phosphorus within the century is being seriously debated.

2. Water-carriage technology would create public health hazards, such as contamination of the subsoil by leakage, pollution of waterways with threats to drinking-water supplies and shellfish, and the generation of disease-bearing sewer gas.

• Sewer gas (rotten stuff) is know known to be mainly ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which, although poisonous in large willquantities, were never more than a nuisance. Miasma theory that bad smells lead to disease has been rejected.

• Water carriage did create huge public health hazards for drinking water and shellfish.  Even today, roughly 10% of American sewage and 20%-25 of UK sewage (their systems are older) still leaks into groundwater from pipes.  850+ billion gallons are deliberately dumped into rivers, almost entirely by Combined stormwater/wastewater sewers such s those in Portland and New York City.  Nutrients and other concentrated pollutants still have significant negative impacts on waterways. In low-density areas, onsite (i.e. septic) systems have similar rates of failure and usually have a higher per-capita groundwater impact.

3. The costs of sewerage systems would create a heavy tax burden.

• The average single family household spends $60 on sewer fees per month  or $720/year in Portland, Oregon (City of Portland 2012).   In Portland the average family spends 1.3% of their income on sanitation in the form of sewer fees (City of Portland 2012). Sewer fees in Portland were the #2 complaint to the Mayor’s office in 2010 (Mercury 2010).

• Falmouth a town of 31,500 people in Cape Cod is expected to spend 595 million to design and construct a sewer system, costing $18,000 per resident plus $500 in maintenance per year (Barnhart, 2011).

[3a] If financed with bonds, sewers would impose costs on future generations with no voice in the decision.

• Decades of population growth spread out the large up-front bonds of most existing systems.

• World population is expected to peak and decline within the 25-100 year timespans of normal infrastructure bonds, although local conditions vary.

• Many people in suburban and peri-urban areas are often compelled to hooked up to the existing sewer after, rather than before, rapid population growth.  The cost of hooking up to the sewers comes to roughly $15,000-$20,000 per resident, not counting usage rates and maintenance. Average Operations and maintenance costs for sewers in portland is $99.6 million moving sewage and $13.9 million treating sewage (City of Portland 2011). Political battles usually ensue (Har 2003).

The boxes represent the yearly excrement of just one person.

Sewers won over goverments. While capital and resource intensive, they encourage density and growth. Although polluting, they provide centralized, controllable outcomes that fit 19th century drives for centralization, professionalization, bureaucratization, and control (Tarr).

Sewers and piped water won over users because flush toilets provided a better user experience than wells and pail closets (seat with a bucket under it), were an aspirational household appliance, fit into contemporary notions of progress, and owning one’s own infrastructure comes with surprise costs, rather than easy, steady municipal taxes.

Pail closet (seat with a bucket under it) were used by a majority of residents of Manchester, Copenhagen, and other poorer European cities into the 1930s. These systems were effective but labor-intensive, and failures happened above ground, so that smells, spills, and failures were closer to people, rather than hidden underground.  Decentralized collection technologies, including vacuum pumps, and water-tight vessels were in their infancy and less developed and reliable than plumbing (See De Decker).  America’s last pail collection system ended in 1998 in Skaneateles.

The contemporary alternatives, and what we might do:

Historically, capital itensive and centralized sanitation won out over labor intensive and decentralized systems.  In the future, can we know design systems that are less capital intensive, more information intensive and that aren’t labor intensive? Toilets have a long way to go, and there is probably no magic bullet, and lots of work on service models are needed.  Below are a few contemporary case studies:

Storing and Pumping:

Japan’s pump-out systems serve 10% of the population (Hidenori)

GTZ Technology Review of Urine Diversion Components

GTZ Urine Reuse Urine as Liquid Fertilizer in Agricultural Production in the Philippines: A Practical Field Guide

Composting in Place:

Bullitt Building in Seattle:

Urine Diverting Dry toilets SSWM Fact Sheet: http://www.sswm.info/category/implementation-tools/water-use/hardware/toilet-systems/uddt

Ecodistrict MBRs +vacuum systems OHSU

a good overview

 everything you could ever want to know about it: DEQ site evaluations of the OHSU system

Containerized collection case studies– SOIL in Haiti, Acra (EAWAG review)

Joe Jenkins talks toilet response in Haiti: video

Accra, Ghana’s Co-composting system.

Approach towards Sanitation Education: CLTS ,

Latrines: the VIP (Ventilated Improved Pit Latrine)

The size of the average person’s excrement and the amount of water required to flush it using a low flow dual flush toilet. Luke provided for scale.

Excrement Facts

Amount of Poop and pee a person actually generates in a year:

lower limit of feces: feces: 843 g/week= 0.843 liters  (if it weighs the same as water) = 51 cu inches * 52=2,652 cubic inches = 1.5 cubic feet or 11.5 gallons

–>based on 843g/week, Digestive Diseases and Sciences, Vol. 43, No. 11: 1998, 2358.

upper limit of feces 0.6 lbs per day = 272.155 g  =0.272 L= 17 cubic inches/day or 0.01 cubic feet  or 3.6 cubic feet or 27 gallons

–> based on 0.3-0.6 lbs/day.  Gotaas, Composting-Sanitary Reclamation of Organic Wastes. World Health Organization, Monograph No. 31. Geneva: 1953.

Urine: based on 2 pints/day. Gotaas, Composting-Sanitary Reclamation of Organic Wastes. World Health Organization, Monograph No. 31. Geneva: 1953.

flush water:

Water used to flush a toilet: based on .9 gal/flush 5 flush/day Caroma dual-flush toilet, Caromausa.com: 2010

Water/year: 5 visits per day * 1 gallon flush= 5gals/day *365=  1,825 gallons (for an ultra low flow toilet

Victorian Flush toilets were 5-12 gallons a flush– or 9,000-22,000 gallons of water a year.

grey water: is typically over half of the wastewater produced by a household. US, the per capita water use is ten times the world average, averaging 262 litres per day (FOERCH 2007).

CITATIONS:

Tarr, Joel A. The Search for the Ultimate Sink, University of Akron Press, Akron: 1996.

summary of arguments for and against water carriage: page 186, sewer mileage vs. typhoid fever mortality: page 189, 190.  Water sources, not sewers stopped typhoid:

Sutcliffe, Anthony, “The Autumn of Central Paris: the Defeat of Town Planning 1850-1970″ McGill-Queens University Press: Montreal: 1971.

Mortality in and Typhoid in Paris, see pages 103-104, 106. A stringent program of quarantine, not sewers, controlled typhoid.

Benidickson, Jamie.  The Culture of Flushing, a Social and Legal History of Sewage, University of British Columbia Press, Vancouver: 2007

Changing legal views towards water resources to encourage industrialization, chapter 1, page 11.

FOERCH, W. (2007): Water Conservation. In: Encyclopaedia of Environment and Society, 1919-1922. http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/environment/n1173.xml

Toilets are the most life-saving technology: A statement agregiously misused by the otherwise wonderful Rose George and repeated ad infinitum by fact-lazy NGOs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4zG4xT8svE

Discussed in Boseley, Sarah. “Sanitation rated the greatest medical advance in 150 years” Guardian UK, 18 January, 2007.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/jan/19/health.medicineandhealth3

Sanitation returns more than $7 of value for every $1 invested.  One of Rose George’s better citations

George, Rose.  The Big Necessity Metropolitan Books, London: 2008.

also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4zG4xT8svE

De Decker, Kris. “Recycling animal and human dung is the key to sustainable farming” Low Tech Magazine, Sept 15, 2010.

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/09/recycling-animal-and-human-dung-is-the-key-to-sustainable-farming.html

for the economics of fertilizer and Dutch vacuum sewers.

King, F.H. “Farmers for Forty Centuries” 1911. for the economics of East Asian excreta reuse.

“Exfiltration in Sewer Systems,” EPA/600/R-01/034: December 2000. http://nepis.epa.gov/Adobe/PDF/2000E6PB.pdf

20-25% of English sewage leaks to groundwater , 8% in Hong Kong, 10% average in the US.  Page 18.

Septic seems to have a larger groundwater impact. than sewers, page 25

“EPA Onsite Wastewater Treatment Systems Manual,” EPA/625/R-00/008: February 2002.

http://water.epa.gov/aboutow/owm/upload/2004_07_07_septics_septic_2002_osdm_all.pdf

10-25% of onsite systems are failing– however, failure is usually defined as surfacing sewage, a greater percentage of onsite systems may be contaminating groundwater. Section 1-4, page 8.

“Fact sheet, Report to Congress: Impacts and Control of CSOs and SSOs” EPA, Thursday, August 26, 2004.”

http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/cso/cpolicy_report2004.cfm

Fact sheet: http://www.epa.gov/npdes/pubs/csosso_rtc_factsheet.pdf