Waterless Urinals: A Breath of Fresh Air
Last week we wrote about the ecological stupidity of manufacturing toilet paper from forests, and I'm sure you thought we had exhausted that general area and would be moving on. But not so fast, friends... today, we bring you urinals.
Did you know that every day we are flushing drinking water down urinals? Sounds crazy, doesn't it? Especially since there is a healthier, cheaper and ecologically preferable way to go: waterless urinals.
Water scarcity will undoubtedly rival sea level rise as one of the consequences of global warming. In fact, it might prove to be a far more serious risk.
In the U.S. the driest states have become some of our fastest growing, including Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and southern California. The flow of the Colorado River is at its lowest levels since measurements began at Lee's Ferry, Arizona 85 years ago. Thirty million people in seven states and parts of Mexico depend on the Colorado River for water. Lake Mead, which supplies virtually all the water used by Las Vegas, is half empty and will probably never be full again. Freshwater shortages are already a global concern in Africa, India and China and in the southwest USA they are inevitable.
The battles of yesterday were fought over land, today they are fought over oil, and soon they will be fought over water.
Here's a few stats. Each of the billions of tiny micro-chips in our computers takes anywhere from three to eight gallons of water to make. It takes 26 liters of water to make a one liter water bottle. And each flush of a urinal wastes more than a gallon of water, millions of times each day. About 1.2 billion people, or almost one-fifth of the world's population, live in areas of water scarcity, and 500 million more people are approaching that situation. Lack of safe drinking water and sanitation is the single largest cause of illness in the world, contributing to the death of 5 million people a year and about 5,000 children every day.
So why are government and commercial buildings, theaters, stadiums and arenas throughout the world flushing scarce drinking water down urinals when healthier, cost competitive alternatives exist in the form of waterless urinals?
Waterless urinals are healthier, too. According to the University of Arizona, "Flush type urinals are far more likely to be colonized by bacteria because of the greater presence of moisture [serving] as reservoirs of disease causing microorganisms." Eww!
Waterless urinals conserve water and save money. Props to Staples Center in Los Angeles for converting their 176 urinals to waterless urinals. According to Bill Pottorff, Vice President for Engineering at STAPLES, "We have estimated that we are saving approximately $2,350 per month at STAPLES Center in direct water costs, not factoring sewer charges and any other municipal taxes. Each urinal saves roughly 4.5 HCF per month. We save just over 7,000,000 of water gallons per year."
What is also great about the ecologically intelligent shift made by the STAPLES Center is that the entire urinal replacement program was paid for by grants supplied by the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water, as part of its water conservation program.
So here is our challenge to all stadium and building managers, theater and arena operators in the world: We challenge you to save money. We challenge you to make your restrooms less infectious. We challenge you to conserve water. We challenge you to replace your water wasting urinals with waterless urinals. Now that would be a breath of fresh air.
NRDC.org
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Thought it may be worth offering a view/experiences from across the pond in UK for what it is worth :-).
Cartridge system arean odour trap, they dont last very long and are easily damaged by people pouring water down the urinal and flushing the oil down the trap and the oil seal is replaced by urine, Urine/Urea breaksdown to ammonia, then you get the smells.
In UK there is a product called Envirokube, its a urinal block you just drop in the urinal, turn off the flushing water and when you pee on it is releases large amounts of friendly bacteria which eats the urine and eliminates the smell. It also unblocks the pipes where a lot of odour builds from the uric sludge and scale build up. It means you dont need to fit new urinals and costs @ £3.50/$5 a month (compared to the $40 someone quoted) .
I cant believe that someone in the US has not seen this technology as it appears to be a far cheaper and efficient system and it seemsthere is a massive market demand for it in the US.
I was in a University and it has saved 1,000's litres of water and removed the awful smell, they tell me they have had no blockages or complaints, which they had on a weekly basis!! They said it was simple to install and manage.
Perhaps another solution for people to look at/consider???
ZeroFlush waterless urinals are the way to go. It has the largest trap design in the industry (lower maintenance), consumables lasts a lot longer and costs a lot less (saves more money). These units pay for themselves in no time, coninues to save money and helps the environment. One ZeroFlush waterless urinal saves approximately 40,000 gallons of water per year. Imagine if everyone used ZeroFlush waterless urinals!!!! Reduce drought/water shortage, reduce polution and global warming....
I'm not sure what waterless urinals people are using,but the ones I use regularly emit less odor than normal, water-using urinals. It may be that there are better- and worse-designed waterless urinals. However, that's not a result of them being waterless. There are well-designed waterless urinals out there. Do not let your experiences with some badly-designed ones prejudice you against an important improvement such as this.
pee on your compost.
or around a tree or plant.
ladies i know thats hard to do..but get inventive.
urine is high in nitrogen. it will help your compost break down faster
or diluted with a bit of water(i go direct) can be used as a liquid fertilizer.
if you are worried aboutthe smell ,you probably need to be drinking more water anyway
to dilute your urine.
its really not that complicated.
(but if you 'save' your pee in a container it turns to ammonia if not used promptly ...ergo the smell )
I'm glad I live next to Lake Michigan.
Have fun fighting over water everyone else.
I live in Florida and we also have a big water problem.
Time for astronaut-quality water filters?
Not really sure how well that would go over though, I don't think the average person is too keen on drinking recycle urine...
I've used waterless urinals, and I don't like them much. They're smelly, and I wonder whether the loud blast of air is atomizing some of the urine and spreading it all over everything. Between the smell and the blast, it's hard to believe they're really healthier. But it is important to save water.
By the way, I did switch to toilet paper made from recycled paper, and it costs about half as much as what I was using.
The waterless urinals at our local school don't have a "blast of air". They have a layer of oil under a grate that acts as a trap. Not exactly rosy smelling, but what urinal is?
At my university, the waterless urinals are a simple system that has an oil suspended in a small amount of water. When you urinate, the oil floats on top of it, pushing it down.
there were about 8 waterless urinals in one of the bathrooms here at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, but they have been removed because the janitors were not keeping up with the maintenance of them, so they were a real mess and not a breath of fresh air. i think either they weren't trained well enough or the janitors were just too busy or the key part was too expensive to replace as often as was required for the amount of use they have.
You two sure have a hard time uttering HYDROGEN & HEMP which solves all the problems you are talking about.
You want toilet paper from a renewable 1 year plant, then use HEMP fiber (it out performs wood 4 to 1 on cellulose/pulp ratios).
Then there are the likes of Kissinger to Ghandi that drink their own urine. There are books on urine therapy, it has been used by different cultures since the Egyptian period, the bible has references to it and space crews recover 95% of the water from their urine.
And, if you subjected urine to electrolysis and captured the hydrogen gas and use it to run a hydrogen fuel cell electrical generator, you can have your own free electricity and the by-product being a perfect water molecule which you can then drink (remember the GM hydrogen fuel cell car commercial a couple of years ago and that FLUTE on the pavement containing pure water from the tail pipe of the car).
So there are several ways of dealing with this problem. But don't worry about water shortages, 90% of the global population lives within 100 miles of a ocean coast line. Yeah, there goes the electrolysis/hydrogen gas trick again!!!!
Of all the things I could hope to emulate about Gandhi, drinking my own urine is not near the top of the list. Could you direct me to the biblical reference?
This site is a reference: http://www.fruitnut.net/index2.htm?PAG=50Urine,REF= .
Seems to me we should be flushing toilets and urinals with "grey" wash water from our sinks.
that wouldn't be high tech enough.
Waterless urinals are very LOW tech. In fact, it's surprising they wouldn't have thought of these first, given that they are so simple.
L.A. & L.V. can lead the way or be dragged, kicking & screaming into the future.
So, how long is the payback interval between ripping up all the residential bathrooms in America to install these things and the cost of the water saved? Is there a legitimate cost benefit analysis available, comparing this solution to alternatives such as creating supplies of new fresh water?
Waterfree urinals cost $300 plus. The carttridges which attempt to keep solids out of the system and limit the smell cost about $40. The manufacturers claim the cartidges should last between 5000 and 7000 uses.. I trotted on down to the nearby tennis club which has a dozen of these things installed. The janatorial supervisor tells me the fillters last about 2500-3000 uses, assuming no emergencies occur. In addition the urinals smell despite the more frequent cleaning schedule adopted by the club. Some of the "emergencies" are the result of improper (overenthusiastic) cleaning. In the three years these have been in use, he has come to regard the filter replacement emergencies as part of the cost of doing business in one of these urinals.
The conclusion I came to is that these things are not anywhere near ready for home use. They may be ready for public places, particularly places which already smell bad; but, I doubt they provide much of an financial or health incentive for their potential client base to change from proven technology to this. Water desalinization is a much more likely solution which has meny side benefits.
http://www.airdelights.com/waterfree_urinal.html
And not to mention the carbon footprint of manufacturing the new urinal and it's filters to replace a functioning already manufactured unit.
While I absolutely believe water conservation is vitally important, there are a couple of points I'd like to make here.
1. As an evolutionary holdover from the days of scent-marking, males simply have stronger-smelling urine. Go into nearly any public men's restroom, and this will become immediately apparent. And that's WITH those evil water-hogging urinals.
2. Is it not bad enough that men are treated like freakin' cattle, undeserving of comforts in such a situation as it is? Ladies, you may go to the bathroom in groups, and think they're nasty, but you haven't lived until you've stood shoulder to shoulder with a dozen men, no partitions between you, peeing into a long, foul-smelling waterless trough. This is not at all something we enjoy. It is simply what we're given.
Notice the total absence of any mention of a waterless toilet for women who just need to pee. Why? Because it's REVOLTING! So just stick the men with another unpleasant aspect to add to their already unpleasant lives? The worst aspect of which is a taboo against speaking out about how unpleasant it is? I'm sorry. But at some point, a line must be drawn. Recycle the water or something, but figure something else out.
Hear! Hear! We get troughs. They get bidets. We want our revolution now!
As a card carrying and unapologetic masculist I TOTALLY agree with everything you said except for one thing. My college uses the waterless toilets in one of their bathrooms and I have found them to be cleaner, less odorous and more pleasant than the water hogging variety in the other bathrooms. I've NEVER had a bad experience with the waterless urinals.
Now, any fool knows that women and women's bathrooms use WAY more water than men's urinals and bathrooms do. Urinals may use a gallon per flush but toilets, even low flow ones, us considerably more water than any urinal. Someone needs to do more studies on how to address this even more serious problem.
So is yellow the new green?
Now, yourine talking.
Except, where there is a shortage of water, such as Arizona, the effort saves nothing. Water is pumped from the source, then eventually back to the source. It may be argued that energy is saved, but not water.
The Crow’s Nest is a highly popular restaurant located on the water in the Central Coast city of Santa Cruz, California.
After two years, McClellan couldn’t be more satisfied with their performance. “With our high volume usage, we estimate that we save approximately 60,000 gallons of water per urinal per year. Based on current water and sewer rates, that saves us a total of $1,560 per year, which more than covers the cost of the urinals.
Plus, The Crow's Nest had the greatest house band ever. The Cool Jerks.
Great R&B trumps waterless toilets any day!
You might want to take a physics class.
Water is a limited resource everywhere, even here in the mid-west where it rains all the time. Someone has to dig wells, build reservoirs and filtration plants and install lines to haul the water. Reservoir construction is especially unpopular politically. Fights have already started over building pipelines to pump water from the great lakes to cities hundreds of miles away. Just because water comes out when you turn your tap, doesn't mean it always will. And there are always those years where it doesn't rain for long periods of time, even in Indiana.
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