NYC Restrooms 4 All takes up the challenge

NYC-Restrooms4All-logo

November 4, 2019 We celebrate the launch of partner organization NYC Restrooms 4 All with a post by co-founder and Roosevelt Institute Fellow, Maeve Flaherty. If you’ve spent any time in New York City, you’ve had that sinking sensation– a desperate need to go to the bathroom, and no place to go. You look around…

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Design Trends: Inclusion, Privacy, Efficiency, & Convenience

AllAccessibleToilet

We’ve been taking a closer look at contemporary restrooms and see some excellent trends in their design, namely inclusion, privacy, efficiency, and convenience. INCLUSION Inclusive, gender-neutral restrooms serve everyone from those caring for opposite-sex children or elders to gender non-conforming people. Unlike single unisex ADA toilet rooms, new space-efficient facilities bring everyone into the same…

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Transit’s missing link: The public toilet

This case study illustrates how the lack of a public restroom on a key route can render transit unusable for many riders and what community members can do to fight back. When it opened in late 2016, riders changing buses at an expensive new transit center in Washington State were dismayed to find they had…

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Staying human through hygiene while houseless

Living houseless in an urban environment requires personal savvy and logistic skill. Days are often an endless series of searches, lines, and waits: finding the next meal, a safe place to sleep, a public restroom. Here at PHLUSH, we see toilet availability as a human right and advocate for building urban public restrooms that serve…

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GottaGo! campaigning for public toilets in Ottawa

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This guest blog post is from Joan Kuyek of GottaGo!. The GottaGo! campaign in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is advocating for a network of open clean, accessible public toilets and water fountains in key places in the region. Currently, the only public toilets in Ottawa are in recreation centres, libraries and large parks. When the programming…

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Do you Poop Sustainably? Alternative Toilets Save Water & ReCycle Waste

Urine-Diverting Toilet

This guest blog post is from Atara Jaffe. Sustainability. From mainstream media to blogs, sustainability is not just a buzzword, but is frequently used as a term to embody practices related to survival. Everyone from homeowners to architects are incorporating “sustainability” tactics to slowly transform the way people think and live. While solar panels have popped…

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Toilets around the World

This guest blog post is from Mary Landwer for World Toilet Day 2013. Please check out our ToiletsUSA page for more info. Follow #ToiletsUSA, #LiftTheLid, and #CelebrateTheToilet. Thanks to a popular children’s book, we understand from an early age that Everybody Poops. What many don’t understand, though, is that not everyone has a toilet to do it in.…

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Reinvent the Toilet Fair

This week, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Reinvent the Toilet Fair brought together innovators seeking to define the next generation of toilet technologies. After receiving grants over a year ago, university teams, small firms, and non-profit groups set to work, meeting a short deadline and compelling criteria: toilets must remove pathogens, recover energy and nutrients,…

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Celebrate First Flush of Portland Loo #5 at 1 pm Jan 31st

Isn’t it weirdly cool that we live in a city that celebrates the first flush of every new Portland Loo?  Actually, these repeated inaugurals tell us something.  A product has met a need.  The city has provided a service citizens think is important. People are using the Loo and talking about it.  The co-location of…

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Building Safe Toilet Design into Shared Urban Space

  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…

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