Shiny metal structures have popped up in cities all over the world: automatic toilets that give a user twenty minutes of privacy before the door opens, the person leaves, the door closes, and the robotic sanitation cycle begins. As I’ve said before, these units make so many design sacrifices to achieve the ideal of self-cleaning that they become unusable for their intended purpose: providing a convenient place to poop.
One of the first cities to adopt automatic toilets was Seattle. They spent $5 million in 2004 to build glimmering steel cylinders that turned out to be less ideal for tourists caught without a Starbucks than for people shooting up and having sex with prostitutes. (Fart Poopie provided this firsthand tour back in 2006.)
From today’s New York Times: “Seattle officials say the project here failed because the toilets, which are to close on Aug. 1, were placed in neighborhoods that already had many drug users and transients.” What’s more, unlike other cities, Seattle law prohibit the city from recouping their costs with ads.
“‘Other cities around the world seem to be able to handle toilets civilly,’ said Richard McIver, a Seattle city councilman. ‘But we were unable to control the street population, and without the benefit of advertising, our costs were awfully high.’
“In Seattle, problems arose almost immediately. Users left so much trash behind that the automated floor scrubbers had to be disabled, and prostitutes and drug users found privacy behind the toilets’ locked doors.
“‘I’m not going to lie: I used to smoke crack in there,’ said one homeless woman, Veronyka Cordner, nodding toward the toilet behind Pike Place Market. ‘But I won’t even go inside that thing now. It’s disgusting.’”
But Seattle’s decision isn’t a setback for the cause of public toilets. It’s a step in the direction of a more appropriate technology: humans with brooms for sanitation, and passers-by with eyeballs for security. As the Times says: “Rather than automated toilets, some cities are looking for cheaper alternatives that would be cleaned by human attendants. One prototype, to be installed next month in Portland, Ore., would cost $50,000 each, compared with some $300,000 for an automated unit.
“Randy Leonard, a Portland city commissioner, helped design that toilet, which in addition has open gaps at the top and bottom of the door, a feature discouraging drug abuse, prostitution and the like.”
Public toilets have to balance pooping privacy against the human inclination to do terrible things when no one is watching. The gaps in Portland’s toilet doors will mean that someone might recognize your shoes, but they’ll also ensure the toilets don’t get abused so much that you won’t want to use them at all.
For the past week, astronauts aboard the ISS have been alternating between their only other civilized option — the toilet on the Soyuz return capsule — and a “back-up bag-like collection system” NASA engineers developed for just such an emergency. Given the challenges surely presented by peeing in zero-gravity (picture splashback droplets floating around the cabin like plankton in a poorly-maintained aquarium), the mechanical toilet surely involves some sort of negative air-pressure device that sucks urine into a receptacle; I’m hard-pressed to imagine how a non-mechanical device can properly function.
On Earth, sanitary waste management relies on two forces: the muscles of the body, which physically propel liquids and solids at velocity through one of two apertures; and gravity, which we trust to ensure that-which-is-no-longer-us goes into the toilet and stays there. Our bodies evolved to rely on gravity as a constant; there’s a reason these excretory apertures function best when aimed downward. But in space, while the muscles of the body continue to function, the lack of gravity means that streams of effluvia will not simply drop with a satisfying plop, but instead ricochet about an enclosed area with an equal and opposite velocity to that at which it was expelled (allowing for friction caused by viscosity, of course; but in zero-G, you shouldn’t place your hopes for a particle-free oxygen on your waste’s penchant for stickiness).
So on Wednesday, a NASA employee left Russia (where the ISS’s toilet was built) with a thirty-five pound replacement pump packed in a diplomatic pouch and carried onto a commercial airliner as hand luggage. The galaxy’s most important plumber’s assistant is en route to Florida, where Discovery is set for launch on Saturday. The shuttle will dock with the ISS on Monday, at which point the three panicked astronauts aboard the ISS will presumably rush the airlock and head straight to Discovery’s bathroom.
“Never mind modern technology,” said the residents of San Diego, as I discussed back in August of 2006. “Never mind science and reason. Never mind the billions of dollars of research that have gone into developing filtering and cleansing equipment capable of purifying water down to the atomic level.
“Poop,” said the residents of San Diego, “is glue. It’s a special kind of glue that sticks to water and creates a bond that, no matter what science says, no man can tear asunder.”
San Diego has three million people living in a city with enough water for three hundred thousand of them. Nevertheless, forced to make a stupid decision by a superstitious constituency that believes poo love is strong enough to defy physics, San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders took to his desk last November and vetoed the city’s toilet-to-tap water recycling program. The city council overturned his veto, but the fight continues.
But while San Diego bickers over the nature of romance and feces, reason and logic have triumphed in Orange County. This January, officials opened the world’s largest water purification project. Wired News has a cool pictures of the systems that will provide clean water to 100,000 Orange County residents at rates lower than most other municipal sources. The plant cleanses and purifies the water and then flows it into nearby lakes, where it slowly trickles down into the aquifer and then, months later, back into the taps of the residents.
Slate Magazine provides a brief look into the water crisis facing California and the world. (And it points out the irony in Orange County’s system: “Although putting water into the ground, rivers, or lakes provides some additional filtering and more opportunities for monitoring quality, the benefits of doing it that way are largely psychological. In its 2004 report on the topic, the EPA concluded that Americans perceive this water to be ‘laundered’ as it moves through the ground or other bodies of water, even though in some instances, according to the report, ‘quality may actually be degraded as it passes through the environment.’” In fact, supertreated wastewater “is clean enough to drink right after treatment.”)
More American cities need to follow Orange County’s example. It collects sewage and, in accordance with the laws of nature and the State of California, allows poop and water to divorce. The poop is physically removed from its mate, forced to watch its true love move on with life, enjoy a brief marriage with microfilters and disinfectants, and then return to the water cycle to eventually work its way back into a toilet and find a new piece of poop to mate with. Poo and water have a strong relationship, but nothing lasts forever. If only San Diego would get the message.
In the bathroom utopia of the glorious future, pristine municipal facilities will await on every corner, their stall doors wide open to all comers and goers. This utopia will come into being only when the golden brown rule (”Doo unto others…”) is held sacrosanct — until then, as long as public toilets provide a respite from prying eyes, there will be those who use them less wholesome acts than that for which they’re designed.
This is the problem confronting authorities who want to provide for their pooping populace: the more open and accessible toilets are for those who need to go, the more open and accessible they are for those with other things on their minds. Drug addicts, prostitutes, thieves, arsonists, and turd terrorists thrive in the surveillance vacuum created for the benefit of the emboweled. But most measures taken to add security come at the expense of usability.
The solution to this problem, as Finland’s Road Administration has shown, may lie not in prevention but in deterrence. Their problem was theft and arson in highway toilets and an inability to institute appropriate surveillance. Their solution was to encourage self-policing by trading surveillance for accountability.
Pulling into a rest-stop on Finland’s Highway 1, you’ll find the bathroom door locked. To unlock the toilet, text “open” to such-and-such number. The company managing the service will keep a short-term record of who’s been pooping, so if anything unsavory (aside from last night’s Mämmi) happens, the police will have the mobile number of the culprit.
Assuming the company protects their users’ privacy (a non-trivial assumption, I admit), and assuming the mobile numbers aren’t passed to telemarketers selling portable toilet seat covers, I see no problem in this approach. If people know they will be identified, they’ll be less likely to cause trouble.
It’s obviously not a foolproof system — stolen mobiles will be a problem, as will friendly people who hold the door open for people waiting. But there’s no such thing as a foolproof system. The goal should be to find the balance between privacy and security that maximizes the period between incidents of excretory malfeasance.
100% uptime can be guaranteed only if a) privacy is completely surrendered or b) society is fully assimilated into the bathroom utopia. Finland has made a good compromise: mostly secure, and mostly private. That’s a bathroom I’m willing to poop in.
As at any other conference, delegates arriving at the 2007 World Toilet Summit in New Delhi are handed a tote bag full of schwag. Unlike any other conference, however, our bags contained two small plastic containers of human waste.
Composted human waste, of course. In one, a few powdery ounces of “human excreta-based manure” (2.0% nitrogen, 6.9% phosphorus, 0.4% potassium); in the other, a “hard ball” of composted humanure mixed with adhesive. I don’t know what one does with a “hard ball” of poop, but I do know that it has absolutely no smell.
Yes, I gave it a whiff.
At the 2007 World Toilet Summit, which runs until Saturday, 153 international delegates from 39 countries have joined 172 Indian attendees to discuss and debate issues of sanitation. This year’s theme is “Toilet for All” — a reference to the 2.6 billion people around the world who don’t have one, which contributes to 1.8 million children dying of diarrheal diseases every year. Academics, scientists, economists, bureaucrats, NGO representatives, and at least one writer of books about poop have gathered to present papers, discuss strategies, examine technologies, and kick off preparations for the U.N.-declared International Year of Sanitation, just two months away.
In a vast assembly hall straight out of every movie I’ve ever seen about the UN (headphones for listening to translations, delegates bowing their heads in conference), the event kicks off. I count two dozen photographers and at least ten video crews documenting speech after speech by dignitary after dignitary — Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of Sulabh International; Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization; His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange of the Netherlands; former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam; and, symbolically, a “former scavenger woman” who was “liberated” from the “demeaning” practice of collecting human waste from household cesspools by Dr. Pathak’s organization. (Their words, not mine.)
The speeches adhered to what I’ve learned to be the grand Indian tradition in which each speaker lavishly honors the people on the dais before any other words are uttered; only after flowers are given, plaques are presented, and accomplishments are praised can each speaker then move on to exhort of the attendees that everyone in the world should have a toilet. (The word “toilet” is used in a sense broader than the flushing Ferguson we’re all familiar with; here, it means simply an apparatus that accepts and stores poop in a sanitary way.)
I hear lots of statistics, but little to keep my attention. As fascinated as I am by the human waste infrastructure, and as concerned as I am about 2.6 billion of my fellow humans, toilets can indeed be rendered humorless and uninteresting.
It’s Jack Sim’s speech that brings back the excitement. And he does it by addressing one of the two common baselines at which people view toilets: they’re funny. “I think,” he said, rising to the lectern as we round out the second hour of interminable speeches, “after this long discussion, I don’t have to convince you right now of the importance of a toilet.”
Sim wants to make sanitation “sexy.” His solution to the sanitation crisis is not to deliver a bunch of toilets to a bunch of villages, but to address it as a problem of demand. To him, 2.6 billion people living without sanitation isn’t a function of poverty — it’s a function of demand. It’s less important to bring sanitation to people that it is for them to want to be sanitized. It’s not even necessary for people to know WHY toilets are important — he just wants them to want them.
His strategy is to educate suppliers — from the smallest rural plumber to the largest corporation — on the profit potential even rudimentary toilets possess when multiplied by almost half the world’s population. It would be primarily up to local suppliers to generate demand — a strategy that will position the toilet in ways far more culturally-relevant than any NGO-sponsored campaign could accomplish, and could deliver toilets far faster than any not-for-profit approach could facilitate.
He also exhorted politicians to help eliminate taboos by taking pictures next to toilets.
The next day, at the toilet Expo: the latest innovations in porta-potties. A new technology to retrofit any urinal into a waterless apparatus. A latrine that utilizes negative air pressure to suck out all smells. Composting toilets. Solar toilets. Toilets on trains. A grade-school sanitation club’s posters depicting the dangers of open defecation in the fields (which, as the crayoned drawings graphically depict, include being bitten on the ass by a cobra).
And then, at the delegates’ presentations: a call for the American government to legislate more public toilets. Tours of rural toilets from the Philippines, Africa, and Germany. Descriptions of schools toilets across India and Nepal. A debate of the benefits of sitting toilets versus the squatting kind (with the cryptic subtitle “Demedicalisation of hemorrhoids therapy/prevention”). An impassioned call for the creation of a Canadian Toilet Organization to address that country’s water resource issues that ran far over the allotted time. As the moderator progressed from polite exhortation to all-out shouting for him to stop, the speaker finally announced that Canada’s desperate need for a toilet organization has finally been met — by the speaker himself, who is now forming a Canadian Toilet Organization.
While the Toilet Summit skews towards issues affecting developing nations, the World Toilet Organization represents toilet needs of all countries. This leads to strange juxtapositions of concerns — one delegate calls for US airlines to provide more toilets for their passengers, while the next pleads on behalf of distant villages for even one toilet at all.
The air at the World Toilet Summit is one of optimism. Unlike many of humanity’s problems, this is a fight that can be won. A billion more people have access to sanitation than did twenty years ago. Jon Lane, executive director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, looks at the technology — affordable — and the strategies — proven — and issues a declaration: “We can achieve universal sanitation in our lifetime.”
There is one more day left in the conference. Hopefully I’ll find out what to do with my ball of composted shit.
The UN has declared 2008 to be the International Year of Sanitation. Their intention is to jumpstart lagging efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals for hygiene, household sanitation, and wastewater — goals that include reducing by half the 2.6 billion people who don’t have access to basic sanitation.
But sanitation isn’t like AIDS or malnutrition — it’s an issue that is at once both deadly serious and kinda hilarious. That’s not just my opinion — those confronting the issue know that humor is as much a part of the cause as activism. And far from relying on somber recitations of statistics, sanitation advocates are embracing humor to get their message across.
“We need to make toilets and sanitation sexy,” says World Toilet Organization president Jack Sim. “We’re planning to ask all politicians to take pictures next to toilets. I think 2008 is our great chance to influence the minds of our politicians and leaders.”
That’s a great idea. But it’s a good thing it’s not happening until 2008, because right now isn’t quite the right time for politicians to pose in poopers. A headline from today’s New York Times: Fateful Bathroom Draws Crowds of the Curious.
The bathroom in question, of course, is Larry Craig’s. “Since Aug. 27,” reports The Times, “when the arrest of Mr. Craig became known publicly, the restroom has become a source of amusement for travelers and employees at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Some pose for pictures before the outer door. Others enter to zoom in on the light-blue stall the senator used, the eighth of nine in a row. The undercover officer who arrested Mr. Craig was in the stall to his right, the seventh stall.”
The behavior of these tourists prove that Jack Sim has it exactly right: nothing gets the public’s attention like toilets. By the time 2008 rolls around, the toe-tapping associations will have faded from our minds, and pictures of senators with shitters will be useful in calling attention to the serious issues that need addressing.
In the meantime, I’ll be in that airport in two weeks. You bet I’ll be taking a picture.
To many of us, handicapped stalls are the most glorious achievement in restroom architecture: an area more spacious than most New York City apartments, hand bars for when you really need to bear down, and a mild taboo against use by able-bodied people that keeps it cleaner and more private than most of the other options. But few have considered the reason a handicapped stall is necessary in the first place: because normal stalls require of the user two functional legs, and functional legs are something a small but significant portion of the population lacks.
The Americans With Disabilities Act requires that public accommodations must provide accessible facilities for disabled people. This ensures a building meets the needs of every bathroom-going member of the public. But access comes at a cost: handicapped bathrooms require twice the real estate to provide the same amount of convenience. More money has to be invested in providing less utility.
And these stalls aren’t exactly easy on the users, either. A wheelchair-bound bathroom-goer has to maneuver his chair back and forth into a position at which he can push his butt off the chair and onto the toilet — not an easy thing to do when, like any able-bodied user, your biggest concern is to keep you pants from touching the floor.
Korean designers Changduk Kim and Youngki Hong have solved this problem with their Universal Toilet. Not only does it require a quarter of the space of a typical handicapped stall, but it provides a single appliance that poopers of all physical abilities can utilize.
The major cognitive breakthrough of the Universal Toilet is the reversible crapper: fully-abled users can assume the standard position facing the door, while handicapped users can easily lift off their chair and mount the throne in the backwards position. Roll up, lift off, unload, push off, roll out.
This concept should be embraced by all concerned parties — building developers, handicapped users, and fully-abled users alike. In addition to saving money and space, the design removes the social stigma many disabled poopers feel is imposed on them by their exclusive stalls. “Disabled people,” Kim and Hong say, “don’t want dedicated facilities. What they really want is to live seamlessly with everyone.”
The only obvious fault in this design is fairly trivial: the seat itself. Straddling that angular surface seems to promise an unusual and uncomfortable pooping experience. But everything in a design prototype like this is intentional, which means this seat must have some specific intent. I can think of two: first is that this seat design is just a focal point for criticism. With critics and bloggers focusing on this minor detail, the over-arching idea is accepted as given. Once the seat is redesigned, the critics are placated and the idea itself can move forward without resistance. (It’s a trick I’ve learned whenever presenting work to a boss: provide an obvious flaw for them to correct so they feel like they’ve done their job.)
The second possibility is that the angular seat is designed to force the butt cheeks apart (as opposed to traditional seats, which squish the butt cheeks together). In this, it’s possible that Kim and Hong have actually created two revolutionary toilet redesigns: the Universal Toilet, and the Butt Spreading Toilet Seat.
Come to think of it, there may be a third revolutionary toilet redesign hidden in this Universal Toilet technology: how often do you find a public toilet with a comfortable backrest?
“I think we should have a facility, but not necessarily on one of the prime corners,” says jewelry store owner Stephan Sternat, summing up the attitude of the majority of the shopkeepers in downtown Santa Cruz. There aren’t enough toilets in the downtown area — but while none of the store owners are clambering to open their bathroom doors to shoppers in need, neither are any willing to volunteer the sidewalk in front of their store for the city to install a self-cleaning public toilet unit.
It’s a debate we’ve seen over and over again in American cities, a problem caused by a lack of foresight in whatever zoning scheme has brought identical Baby Gaps and J. Crews to hundreds of city centers across the country: while shoppers have all the Cinnabons and Mrs. Fields they can handle, there are precious few locations for when the buns and cookies become too much to bear. And even when respite is provided, public toilets quickly become havens for drugs, prostitution, and other evils in which people like to partake behind doors nobody wants to open anyway.
Like Santa Cruz, a number of cities have considered those fancy self-cleaning robotic toilets, but the cost of those can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, aside from traditional bathrooms that janitors have to clean and cops have to monitor, there are only a few alternatives. China is catering to Beijing poopers through economies of scale with a new facility putting a thousand toilets under one roof. Unlike the deserted nighttime city center toilets in many American cities, this giant bathroom will have around-the-clock traffic, ensuring that too many eyeballs will be around for the kind of vices that thrive in deserted areas to crop up.
The city of Portland is trying a more progressive route: they’re bringing the toilets under the watchful eye of the city government by opening City Hall’s bathrooms to late-night users. These toilets will presumably be adequately monitored and staffed; better yet, there’s probably some law banning turd terrorism on government property with a punishment stringent enough to discourage even the most dedicated shitman. With maintenance and cleaning, Portland’s program will cost $46,500 over six months — more expensive, in the long run, than Santa Cruz’s robocrapper, which cashes in at $250,000 for the unit and $70,000 for the yearly maintenance. But why invest in a cyber facility when all you really need to ensure safe pooping are a few bored security guards and a few nearby mops?
Back in Santa Cruz, though, the city has turned down the high-tech fix for the age-old problem in favor of the age-old solution: no bathroom at all.
A few weeks ago I had a great interview with one of Europe’s biggest newspapers. Three million Europeans, the reporter promised me, would soon be learning all about Poop Culture. It was to be a full page on the cover of their arts section dedicated to my theories on, among other things, the media’s aversion to taking poop seriously.
More prophetic my interview could not have been. I received this email from the reporter a few days ago:
Oh Dave I’m so bummed!
The article was supposed to run last Sunday. I submitted it and my editor-in-chief loved it. We bought some cool pictures for the layout and it looked great.
But… it wasn’t in there. Turns out people from ‘higher-up’ were shocked when they heard about the subject and pulled it out last minute. It’s so weird to have people do exactly what we were warning against in the article itself! As if they didn’t read it…
It’s the first time this has happened to me in the three and half years since I’ve been working for the paper.
This is the problem with poop: no one wants to touch it. The reporter did say she’d try to submit the article to some other publications, but she didn’t hold out much hope.
If you’re in New York City this September, you can witness the birth of a movement. Remember Bobby Tisdale from the Poop Culture book release party? He and I are going to be co-hosting a poop culture/poop comedy series at Rififi in the East Village. Called “I Doo Indeed,” it will feature poop-related stand-up comedy and storytelling from NYC’s funniest comedians, punctuated with history and context from your humble webmaster. (The debut of I Doo Indeed has been pushed back until September because Bobby has to film a pilot for Comedy Central. Let’s hope the pilot fails miserably so he can focus on what’s *really* important.)
But if you’re not in NYC, you’ll still be able to join the fun. We’ll be uploading videos to IDooIndeed.com — and if we get enough subscribers, we’ll certainly be able to justify taking the show on the road. Check out IDooIndeed.com to get yourself on the mailing list.
In the meantime, I’ve got a sneak peak for you. First off, here’s a few minutes of Bobby Tisdale and I on stage at Rififi a few weeks ago, talking about what we’ve got planned.
And next is the best eighty seconds of comedy from the Poop Culture book release party, edited down by Paul.
My recent lectures in Iowa and Baltimore, and the success of the book release party last weekend here in Brooklyn, have proven to me that people want to appreciate intellectual poop humor in forums other than print and the web. The country just might be ready for a traveling poop show.
First stop: Philadelphia.
It’s called The Tao of Poo: A Night of Poop Humor and Poop Culture. On June 2 at Philadelphia’s Fleisher Art Memorial, I’ll be joining four comedians for an evening of history, culture, and cringe-inducing bathroom stories. Each comedian will tell their tale of woe — be it the unfortunate confluence of rush-hour traffic and IBS, or a sadistic gastroenterologist’s solution to constipation — after which I’ll provide insight and understanding into the ideological history of the toilet or the origin of shameful shitting. It’s yin and yang — equal parts hilarious poop stories and fascinating poop culture.
You can find a lot more info and reserve tickets at The Tao of Poo. Tell everyone you know in the Philly area — if this is a success, then there’s a really good chance it’ll be hitting other cities soon.
A friend of mine is working on a video compilation featuring the highlights of the evening. In the meantime, here’s me up on my soapbox for your viewing enjoyment.
