You may be dealing with a plumbing issue. You may get sent back in time and realize you don't have the strength to go on without indoor plumbing. You may get asked this by a small child who, up until that moment, was the one person who believed you had the answer to everything. Trust me. Sooner or later, you are going to want to know this.
Why does the water rush out of the bowl of the toilet so fast when the lever is in the tank? Why does a slow rush of water fail to clear the bowl completely? Why do toilets always seem to block up on Friday night before a long weekend? We can answer two of those questions with physics. The last will just have to depend on, oh, let's say karma.
Toilets have three major components. The first is a bowl. We all know what that's for. The second is a tank. We can all see that. The last is behind the bowl, in that little tube from whose bourn - hopefully - no traveler returns. That part is a siphon. As simple machines go, siphons get less respect than wheels, levers, or inclined planes; but to be fair, not that many people know that siphons make flush toilets possible. If they did, siphons would be celebrated.
A siphon works because it allows water to move like a chain instead of like discrete particles. Grab a pitcher and fill it with water. Stick a length of flexible tube deep in the water and let the tube droop down over the side of the pitcher. Then suck one the end of the tube until the water comes up over the edge of the pitcher and down the tube a ways. The water in the tube will splash on the floor. (Oops. Did I not tell you to put a container there to catch the water? My bad.) But the water in the length of tube climbing up the side of the pitcher will not fall back down into the pitcher. It'll keep going, drawing more and more water over the side until the pitcher empties onto the floor. (Really my bad. I mean. Did I have to tell you a whole pitcher? Couldn't I have just said a glass?) The water will be drawn over the side the same way a length of beads will be drawn over the side of a container if the beginning of the strand is pulled over the side.
It doesn't seem to make sense that water will act like a chain when it breaks apart so easily under other circumstances. Water molecules, though, have their own cohesive forces. That's why they even stick together in the first place. The cohesion, under the constraints of the walls of the siphon tube, will allow the water to act like string. There are even self-siphoning fluids, where the molecules are so tangled and long that even a bit over the lip of glass will siphon off the whole thing. (Some sticklers will argue that atmospheric pressure, which pushes on the water in the pitcher, plays a part. If the water filling the tube "breaks apart," there will be a vacuum, which will suck the water back together again. Most, though, say it's just plain cohesion that makes it work.)
How does this help a toilet flush? Behind the bowl, there's a little pipe that goes up, like a siphon tube that's built into the pitcher. However, since there's no water in there, no water is being siphoned out of the bowl. However, when you flush, you empty the tank into the bowl. The increase in water fills the bowl until the water makes it over the apex of the siphon tube behind it, and down into the pipes below. Once that happens, the rest of the, oh, let's say "water," in the bowl gets siphoned out, and the bowl can begin to refill.
As for why a toilet doesn't seem to work if the flow is low or slow, the water doesn't fill the tube of the siphon. Instead it pours over the side in a meager, steady trickle that doesn't allow the siphon to kick into gear.
As to why they break on holiday weekends, that's between you and your dietician.
Why Toilets Are Still Made of Porcelain
We've been sitting on the same kind of crapper for centuries. Sure, the plumbing has gotten more tucked away and seats are now fashioned out of all sorts of materials and styles (including plush vinyl embroidered with cats), but as far as the toilets themselves go, hundreds of years after they were invented, they're still largely porcelain.
But why? Isn't there some fancy new material that's better at holding up to our modern gustatory preferences?
Not really!
A toilet needs to do three things well, according to Brian Hedlund, Kohler's senior product manager for toilets. First, "It needs to be a flushing engine." Next, he says, "It needs to be water-proof, clean, and sanitary." Finally, explains Kohler's king of thrones, "it needs to be sturdy." Because people sit on it. Some of those people will be quite heavy. Porcelain, as it turns out, aces at all three of these requirements.
Most important to the user is that the toilet be an effective, ahem, waste remover. But what looks to most of us like some water swirling down a hole to who-knows-where is actually a machine with a pretty complicated design. "The tank, bowl, jetway, trapway—it's highly detailed," says Hedlund. "There's a lot of intricate engineering." Vitreous china toilets (what we call porcelain) are made from clay and water. The manufacturing process, which includes being poured into a mold, finished, glazed, and then sent through a kiln, is pretty straightforward and fairly inexpensive.
Plastic, on the other hand, is formed into objects via extrusion or injection molding. For a structure as complicated as the toilet, plastic manufacturing is prohibitively expensive. That's why plastic's presence on the throne is typically confined to the seat; it's just too expensive to have a leading role.
Another factor is durability. Let's face it, we've all needed to haul ass to the toilet—and when that happens, the thing better damn sure not give way beneith us. Vitreous china is super strong and highly rigid. Plastic, though, has some give. While it likely won't buckle under the weight of a hard landing, it certainly might feel that way, and the way it feels matters to users.
Ok, so maybe plastic isn't practical. What about stainless steel? It's strong and easy to manufacture. Hell, they have steel toilets in jail, right... The problem, it seems, is user experience. While stainless steel is super sturdy, it's also really sensitive to temperature changes. In other words, it will freeze your ass. Topping it with a plastic or wood seat just doesn't look right, and prison chic doesn't go very far in the average home.
Porcelain is also a champ at shrugging off water. It may sound simple, but a porous material will allow liquid and bacteria in, so being impervious to both is important in a structure that's main job is to deal with waste. The key to keeping water out is in the porcelain's glaze. After the toilet is coated, it's fired in a kiln. Unlike, say, grout in a shower, which takes on both water and bacteria, the glaze stops bacteria at the toilet's surface.
Having all the gross stuff remain on the toilet's surface also makes it easier to clean. (Imagine if cleaning the toilet were any less pleasant.) And every year another wave of aggressive cleaning products claim to do better work on the bowl. In order to ensure that the toilet can withstand the pressure from both abrasion and chemicals, Kohler sends their cans through the equivalent of 20 years of use, or 80,000 scrubs. The testing, Hedlund says, just confirms that people are more likely to upgrade their toilets for water conservation or style reasons than for actual need.
It's amazing the porcelain has remained our number one for so long, especially considering, says Hedlund, that "no one uses the toilet the same way." I'm not really sure what he's talking about, but it makes sense for the man behind the magic to have high standards. In fact, it's very comforting - a defective toilet is an awful, awful thing.
Manhattan
From the Standard Hotel lavatories, guests have a fabulous view of Manhattan, and Manhattan has a fabulous view of them.
It is a sunny afternoon in New York, and from where I am sitting I can see the apartment blocks of Chelsea, the towers of Midtown Manhattan and the Empire State Building, pricking the washed-out blue sky like a great grey syringe. I am sitting on a lavatory.
The lavatory cubicles at the top of the Standard Hotel might just be the last word in voyeurism, even for a city full of show-offs. The hotel is a glass and concrete edifice shaped like an open book, suspended above the High Line aerial park on concrete legs. The rooms all have floor-to-ceiling windows. Guests have a fabulous view of Manhattan, and Manhattan has a fabulous view of them.
Yet even the most exhibitionist members of an exhibitionist’s city have been startled by the triangular lavatory cubicles on the hotel’s 18th floor. These also have floor-to-ceiling windows, and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the two adjoining walls. The vast scale of the vista makes you feel a little anonymous, which is quite comforting when your trousers are round your ankles. As you watch New Yorkers going about their business, you do start to wonder if they can see you, going about yours.
The answer is yes, they can — a fact that was illustrated recently by a photographer with a long lens. Blurry photographs of people on the lavatory have been published in several American newspapers.
After my own visit, I went downstairs to the marketplace beneath the hotel. The traders there keep a score board. “Who’s winning the naked people game?” shouted Sarah Booz, 28, from her stall selling fried balls of risotto. A lady at a neighbouring stall shrugged. “I think it’s Ben,” Ms Booz said — referring to a man who works at a wood-fired pizza stall. That week alone, she had seen a couple in flagrante, and several naked men. “I see dudes in the morning, standing there naked,” she said. “It’s like they’re surveying their kingdom.”
Studying Poop
In the wee hours of the morning in a lab in Amherst, Massachusetts, geoscience graduate student Rob D’Anjou sat looking over test results, a pot of coffee nearby. He’d been pulling long days to analyze two narrow columns of silt, mud, and other sediment cored from the bottom of Lake Liland in Arctic Norway, and, frustratingly, was seeing no sign of the molecules with which he’d been hoping to reconstruct the temperature and precipitation records during the lake’s last 7,000-odd years.
There were a number of other substances in the cores, though. And some of those other substances, he realized with a jolt, looked familiar. He turned to a cache of chemistry papers and, with their help, confirmed his suspicion: He was looking at human fecal sterols, the last chemical hurrah of poop. And these feces were decidedly ancient ones, manufactured, as it were, starting more than 2,000 years ago.
D'Anjou knew that the find, however unglamorous it might be, was an important one. Human fecal sterols are, by definition, indicators of the presence of human beings and may provide a way to track the migration of ancient peoples, as well as to help paleoclimatologists assess those populations' effects on the environment. When he presented his data before the geosciences department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the scientists in the audience were quick to suggest colorful titles for his study. But D'Anjou and his colleagues spent the following couple years giving the samples a far more sober kind of consideration. Their work, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, marks the first time fecal sterols have been used this way, but it more than likely won't be the last.
Lake sediments have long been a rich trove of clues to ancient human history—but often only indirectly so. Paleoclimatologists have probed ancient silt for grains of crop pollen and charcoal from fires, for instance, in attempts to say definitively whether and when human beings were on the scene. But pollen can blow in from miles away, and fires occur naturally, making such techniques, even when used in combination, fuzzy at best.
That’s in part why such a lengthy record of defecation excited D’Anjou. Fecal sterols, produced in the guts of mammals during the digestion of cholesterol, are familiar to science. Different mammal species produce slightly different flavors of sterols, and they have been used by archaeologists to determine whether ancient farmers used manure on their fields and to pinpoint the location of long-ago latrines. Modern environmental scientists also use them to detect sewage contamination in deltas and estuaries. No one, though, seemed to have looked for sterols in a sediment core before.
The first thing D'Anjou did was to create a timeline of the precise level of the sterols at different depths of the cores—which correspond, of course, to different points in time. Then he assembled timelines of two other substances in the cores: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are released when plant matter is burned, and plant waxes, which allow paleoclimatologists to deduce whether nearby land was forested or cleared, presumably for farming.
When these plots were all put next to one another, along with temperature data from tree rings, D'Anjou saw a story emerge. For the first 4,000 or so years of the record, human fecal sterol levels were nearly zero, and the levels of the hydrocarbons were low too. The plant waxes suggest that the land was forested. Then, about 2,250 years ago, the sterol and hydrocarbon levels spike dramatically, and a greater proportion of the land was cleared. The levels of fecal sterols remain elevated for hundreds of years, often falling after a sudden temperature drop, which might have made agriculture untenable in the already-chilly Arctic. Sterol levels rise again when the temperature warms, but a significant dip occurs around 550 AD, continuing gradually downward, in tandem with records of migrations in Scandinavia, mostly for political and socioeconomic reasons. Levels later recover, but another dip occurs around the time of the Black Plague in the 14th century, when historical records show that more than 80% of the area's farms were abandoned.
It’s a compelling story and the scientists did a commendable job of assembling it, according to Ted Van Vleet, an emeritus professor of chemical oceanography at University of Southern Florida who has used fecal sterols to study sewage pollution. “There are maybe other interpretations, but the scenarios that the authors present [are] solid,” he wrote.
Still, D'Anjou and his team readily acknowledge the possibility of those other scenarios. Just because sterol levels drop, they concede, doesn’t necessarily mean there was an equivalent drop in the human population. “If it got a lot wetter, and there was more transfer of material from wherever they were pooping, that kind of uncertainty is definitely there,” says climatologist Ray Bradley, D’Anjou’s advisor.
But, Bradley points out, the fecal sterol signal appears to be extraordinarily sensitive. Further back in history, when human sterols were almost completely absent, the team still saw small amounts of the kinds deposited by grazing animals. “We were able to detect that, which is really amazing,” Bradley says. “There couldn’t have been that many moose and deer wandering about. But nevertheless that signal was detectable in the sediments.” That suggests that the magnitude of the error, in most cases, might not be very large.
Going forward, the team hopes to sample nearby lakes to see if fecal sterols are preserved there too, and to team up with archaeologists to see if sterols in sediment cores elsewhere can help answer questions of when humans arrived on the scene in places in like Polynesia. One member of the current team, however, adjunct professor of geoscience David Finkelstein, is planning experiments closer to home. Interested in how fresh poop versus aged poop shows up in the chemical record, he has made calls to local farms to see about getting specimens for weathering studies. He has already encountered some skepticism.
"'Are you guys serious?' That's always the question on the other end of the phone," he says. His answer: "'Yes, sir, we are serious about our poop here.'"
Sanitation
A new study in Environmental Science & Technology estimates six out of 10 people on planet Earth don’t have access to flush toilets or adequate water-related sanitation. In other words, 4.2 billion human beings desperately need a technology you use every day and couldn't give less of a shit about.
Think about it. In your bathroom, you basically have a bucket full of water that can empty and refill itself. You only use it for one purpose - waste disposal - and yet it likely smells better than your garbage can or kitchen sink.
And that water? It’s magic. You can sit there and pour cup after cup of water (or, you know, whatever) and the water level will remain almost exactly the same. But if you dump a few gallons in at once, the siphon initiates and the whole mess disappears completely. You don’t even need electricity or gas to operate the underappreciated flush toilet.
Mainly, toilets dispose of urine and feces without us ever laying a finger on either. I know, this seems a silly thing to point out, but this advancement is more recent than you probably realize. As recently as the early 1900s, much of the American South was still pooping next to a favorite tree. In fact, it wasn't until John D. Rockefeller set out to cure the "damned Southerners" of their laziness that outhouses were invented.
The cause of that malaise, which he thought was keeping Southerners from working productively, was hookworms - tiny, toothy parasitic larvae that hatch out of human feces and crawl around in search of another host’s bare feet. Researchers realized the little buggers could move about a foot a day for four days, so they prescribed outhouses with pits six feet deep. As this simple technology spread, it alleviated iron deficiency anemia, improved health, and boosted school attendance and literacy.
Which brings us back to the rest of the world - 4.2 billion people without proper sanitation. Aside from hookworms, do you know what happens when humans don’t have toilets? Dysentery happens. Typhoid happens. Cholera, hepatitis A, and diarrhea happen. And real diarrhea isn’t like when your 'stomach' hurts and you get to call in sick and spend the day watching Game of Thrones. In Third World countries, real diarrhea kills more people than AIDS.
Obviously, humans have been pooping under trees and into holes for a long time. (Though, some argue we no longer do it properly.) Evidence of waste removal technology may date back to about 3,000 B.C. It’s nothing brilliant - just some drains leading away from stone huts in a Neolithic settlement found in Scotland—but a little sanitation goes a long way.
This is why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation held the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge last year. As so much of the world is without existing technology, the foundation hopes to dramatically improve developing-world sanitation by leapfrogging old technology, similar to the way cellphones are now prevalent in places formerly without so much as a landline. The winning team, from Caltech, built a solar-powered electrochemical reactor toilet. Water and waste gets broken down into fertilizer and hydrogen, the latter of which can be stored in fuel cells as energy. Treated water is recycled for further flushing or irrigation.
Other potential solutions abound, from the U.K. town powered by their own biomethane to the use of tiger worms and black soldier fly larvae. There are even crowd-sourced solutions like Who Gives a Crap Toilet Paper.
And then there’s the good old-fashioned celebrity charity. Matt Damon’s Water.org wins the award for advocacy advertising that doesn't suck. In fact, it’s kind of hilarious. And though his numbers don’t match up with the new doom and gloom from Environmental Science & Technology, the message is the same: It’s time we get our shit together.
How We Wiped
The last time I visited Boston's Museum of Fine Arts was in 2004 to see a Rembrandt exhibition. But I might have wandered away from the works of the Dutch master in search of an ancient Greek artifact, had I known at the time that the object in question, a wine vessel, was in the museum's collection. According to the 2012 Christmas issue of the BMJ (preacronymically known as the British Medical Journal), the 2,500-year-old cup, created by one of the anonymous artisans who helped to shape Western culture, is adorned with the image of a man wiping his butt.
That revelation appears in an article entitled “Toilet Hygiene in the Classical Era,” by French anthropologist and forensic medicine researcher Philippe Charlier and his colleagues. Their report examines tidying techniques used way back—and the resultant medical issues. Such a study is in keeping with the BMJ's tradition of offbeat subject matter for its late December issue—as noted in this space five years ago: “Had the Puritans never left Britain for New England, they might later have fled the British Medical Journal to found the New England Journal of Medicine.”
The toilet hygiene piece reminds us that practices considered routine in one place or time may be unknown elsewhere or elsetime. The first known reference to toilet paper in the West does not appear until the 16th century, when satirist François Rabelais mentions that it doesn't work particularly well at its assigned task. Of course, the ready availability of paper of any kind is a relatively recent development. And so, the study's authors say, “anal cleaning can be carried out in various ways according to local customs and climate, including with water (using a bidet, for example), leaves, grass, stones, corn cobs, animal furs, sticks, snow, seashells, and, lastly, hands.” Sure, aesthetic sensibility insists on hands being the choice of last resort, but reason marks seashells as the choice to pull up the rear. “Squeezably soft” is the last thing to come to mind about, say, razor clams.
Charlier et al. cite no less an authority than philosopher Seneca to inform us that “during the Greco-Roman period, a sponge fixed to a stick (tersorium) was used to clean the buttocks after defecation; the sponge was then replaced in a bucket filled with salt water or vinegar water.” Talk about your low-flow toilets. The authors go on to note the use of rounded “fragments of ceramic known as ‘pessoi’ (meaning pebbles), a term also used to denote an ancient board game.” (The relieved man on the Museum of Fine Arts's wine cup is using a singular pessos for his finishing touches.) The ancient Greek game pessoi is not related to the ancient Asian game Go, despite how semantically satisfying it would be if one used stones from Go after one Went.
According to the BMJ piece, a Greek axiom about frugality cites the use of pessoi and their purpose: “Three stones are enough to wipe.” The modern equivalent is probably the purposefully self-contradictory “toilet paper doesn't grow on trees.”
Some pessoi may have originated as ostraca, pieces of broken ceramic on which the Greeks of old inscribed the names of enemies. The ostraca were used to vote for some pain-in-the-well-you-know to be thrown out of town—hence, “ostracized.” The creative employment of ostraca as pessoi allowed for “literally putting faecal matter on the name of hated individuals,” Charlier and company suggest. Ostraca have been found bearing the name of Socrates, which is not surprising considering they hemlocked him up and threw away the key. (Technically, he hemlocked himself, but we could spend hours in Socratic debate about who took ultimate responsibility.)
Putting shards of a hard substance, however polished, in one's delicate places has some obvious medical risks. “The abrasive characteristics of ceramic,” the authors write, “suggest that long term use of pessoi could have resulted in local irritation, skin or mucosal damage, or complications of external haemorrhoids.”
To quote Shakespeare, “There's a divinity that shapes our ends.” Sadly, for millennia the materials used to clean our divinely shaped ends were decidedly rough-hewn.
"Biosolids"
The 2009 Austin City Limits Music Festival stank.
It wasn’t the bands that were the problem. Earlier that year, Austin had laid sod in Zilker Park, home of the annual fall festival, after years of dust problems, including one gritty festival infamously known as the “dust bowl.” In keeping with the city’s environmentally friendly ways, Austin used a locally made compost called Dillo Dirt when laying the new grass. But a day of heavy rain and tens of thousands of festivalgoers turned Zilker’s lush lawn into a mud pit. Dads toting Texas-orange camping chairs, hipsters decked out in impractical vintage, and college students in bikinis and rain boots all shared the same traumatized, confused expression as they waded into the chocolate-pudding-like sludge: What is that smell? The park was ripe with the scent of human waste.
The culprit? The Dillo Dirt, a compost whose central component is highly treated human waste, known in waste-management circles as biosolids. In cities across the United States, biosolids are being used to achieve greater civic efficiency while reducing costs. But concerns over regulation and health effects and a general uneasiness with our bowel movements—sterilized or not—are providing fodder for punny poop headlines in newspapers large and small.
Humans have been using their own waste as fertilizer for eons, but many Americans remain squeamish about taking the trend to a Portlandia level of green dedication. Nowadays, when you flush the toilet, your waste flows through a multipart system that ultimately discharges treated water into waterways and has standards for how to deal with the leftovers, known as sewage sludge. Until the mid-20th century, cities often dumped raw or partially treated waste directly into nearby rivers, lakes, or oceans. (The 1972 Clean Water Act eliminated most freshwater dumping, but ocean dumping wasn’t outlawed until 1988.) Cities then faced the dilemma of what to do with the 7.18 million tons of sewage sludge produced annually in the United States.
Some wastewater facilities, usually for cost reasons, dump sludge in landfills or incinerate it. The rest—about 55 percent, according to a study published in 2007—use their biosolids for agriculture, reforestation, or as makeshift Slip ‘N Slides. (That’s up from about 30 to 40 percent in the 1990s.) About 230 U.S. facilities compost biosolids to make products like Austin’s Dillo Dirt, which combines biosolids with lawn clippings, branches, and old Christmas trees; others create a heat-dried pellet fertilizer like the Milwaukee-produced Milorganite. Biosolids have been used in the restoration of metal-laden mined lands—such as near Leadville, Colo., and Bunker Hill, Idaho—to “turn moonscapes into revegetated habitats,” says Greg Kester of the California Association of Sanitation Agencies. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, biosolids are used on less than 1 percent of total U.S. agricultural land, but every state has some application of biosolids to the soil.
Biosolids may sound like just a bunch of crap, but the substance is governed by strict standards. EPA rules, coupled with state and local laws, govern the amount of metals biosolids can contain, where they can be used, treatments for reducing pathogens, and restrictions and monitoring of crops that were planted on biosolids-treated fields. More and more wastewater treatment plants are converting their biosolids into Class A products—the top grade—which have no detectable pathogens and could be used to grow herbs in your garden. Class B biosolids are treated less, may carry detectable pathogens, have more restrictions on their use, and require more stringent management practices. Biosolids can reduce agricultural production costs and reliance on chemical fertilizers, replenish organic matter in soil, and improve soil structure. Biosolids are also being used to produce renewable energy. Many wastewater treatment plants—which can account for one-third of a city’s electric utility bill, according to Ned Beecher of the North East Biosolids and Residuals Association—aim to include biosolids in their push for net-zero energy.
Biosolids vary in stink level—which is largely determined by compounds containing ammonium and sulfur—depending on the treatment process. “Odors can be a real concern,” says Beecher, adding that more facilities are now working to eliminate problems like smell. “If we produce a product that’s going to smell if it rains on it, that’s unacceptable.” Zilker Park had no noticeable waste smell the day before the rain; only after festivalgoers churned up the mud did the stench emerge. (If there’s one advantage to biosolids stinking up a music festival, it’s that it makes a late-day port-a-potty trip slightly more tolerable.)
So why are groups such as the Sierra Club or the Organic Consumers Association raising a stink (sorry) about biosolids? They say that outdated regulation, the potential for illness, and the unknown cocktail of components found in human waste make biosolids a disconcerting trend. And research on the long-term health effects of biosolids and their components appears scarce. A 2009 study of the biosolids produced by 74 publicly owned waste treatment facilities found metals, pharmaceuticals, steroids, hormones, flame retardants, and other chemicals in the samples. “It is not appropriate to speculate on the significance of the results until a proper evaluation has been completed and reviewed,” the EPA said of the study. A 2002 University of Georgia study of 48 individuals found that participants living within 1 kilometer of sites where biosolids were applied to the land suffered from skin rashes and burning of the eyes, throat, and lungs after exposure to winds blowing from the treated fields.
But wastewater treatment experts disagree. “There are literally thousands of ongoing programs where biosolids have been applied routinely for two to three decades, and if there were some significant issues, they would have been raised by now,” Beecher says. Many land-grant universities have ongoing biosolids studies, and an 18-month Virginia study concluded “there does not seem to be strong evidence of serious health risks when biosolids are managed and monitored appropriately.”
Another study by the National Research Council, with which Kester was involved, found that there is no documented scientific evidence that EPA biosolids regulations, known as Part 503, have failed to protect public health. In addition, Beecher points out that employees at sewage treatment facilities are at the epicenter of biosolids exposure, and long-term health studies haven’t turned up major health issues. “They’re not paid hazard pay,” he says. “They’re not considered high-risk.”
Though a few Austin festivalgoers reported rashes after slopping around in the park’s Dillo Dirt soup, the only casualties I observed were my flip-flops, shorts, and the formerly white towels in my Austin hotel room. Austin’s health department spokeswoman told the Austin American Statesman nearly two weeks after the festival that there was no evidence that any illnesses had been caused by Dillo Dirt. My two friends and I slushed around shoeless for roughly 10 hours on the muddiest day of the festival, and though the smell may have brought on music festival PTSD (one friend recalls thinking “What the hell died in this park?” and swears that she could taste the smell) we had no rashes or other health issues afterward.
As cities push for greater efficiency and greener policies, biosolids will continue to be a component of that debate. After all, reusing our own waste is the ultimate achievement in efficiency. But we should continue to monitor biosolids’ components and possible health impacts as waste treatment plants simultaneously move to make biosolid products less objectionable and push the limits of their environmental potential. We’re limited only by our supply.
India
A district in the central state of Madhya Pradesh is offering state-funded, mass weddings for girls from poor homes — but only if the groom has an indoor lavatory, and a picture of him in it to prove it.
Rajeev Khare, the head of a group of village councils in Sehore distict, said that when the scheme was introduced two years ago the grooms had only to promise to install a lavatory within a month of marriage. As the scheme became over-subscribed, however, prospective grooms started to boost their applications with photographic evidence. “These people are so poor they wanted to make sure they qualify for the free wedding — so they started sending in pictures,” Mr Khare said.
The scheme, under which 2,500 grooms have taken new wives to their en-suite homes, has spawned additional red tape. “We had a big problem when the pictures started coming in: that of verification,” said the district magistrate, Kavindra Kiyawat. “How could we be sure that it was their own toilet they were posing in?” The solution, he said, was to require the local village authority to validate each groom’s photographic claim.
Fewer than half of India’s 1.2 billion people live in homes with indoor lavatories; in rural areas fewer than a third. The free wedding scheme is just one of dozens of local initiatives to improve sanitation. In a village in Rajasthan children are employed to bang drums and blow whistles if they see anyone relieving themselves outside.
However, for those with no experience of piped sewerage, the concept of an indoor lavatory can seem repellent, and changing attitudes to sanitation has proved difficult in parts of India. When a new bride left her husband in Madhya Pradesh because his home did not have a lavatory it was taken as a sign of shifting views. The man, a labourer, won back his love after he spent his savings installing one. “It is not nice for women to go outside to defecate. Every home should have a toilet,” Anita Narre, the bride, said.
Adult Diapers
Japan’s rapidly aging population is producing some interesting new business opportunities, including a booming market for adult diapers.
The Nikkei newspaper (subscription only) reported on Thursday that three Japanese paper companies—Daio, and Nippon Paper—are expanding their manufacturing facilities for what are politely called “incontinence products” due to an expected surge in demand. The Nikkei said adult diapers are expected to outsell baby diapers in Japan by 2020, but according to Unicharm, Japan’s biggest diaper maker, the tipping point was in 2011.
The adult diaper market is growing at 6-10% a year, and already pulls in 140 billion yen ($1.4 billion) by catering to Japan’s elderly population - it has the highest percentage of over-65s in the world, making up more than 20% of the population.
Demographics aside, adult diapers are an attractive business in their own right—they sell for as much as 2.5 times more than infant diapers, resulting in higher profit margins, and there’s also a lucrative sales channel to institutions like hospitals and nursing homes. Marketing to consumers can still be a minefield (as the parody ad from Saturday Night Live, below, demonstrates) but diaper manufacturers - confident that the embarrassment factor can be overcome - are determined to push the envelope.
Sweden’s SCA, the world’s biggest hygiene product maker, recently sent a sample of its adult diapers to every Swedish man over the age of 55. It was besieged by angry phone calls from men who were perhaps not quite reconciled to needing the company’s products someday.
Japanese Toilets
If you’ve ever traveled to other parts of the world, you’re aware that there’s no monoculture when it comes to defecation. Humanity takes many routes to relief.
Some of us sit on elevated thrones, while others squat above holes. Some of us cleanse ourselves with dry paper, while others employ a nearby pitcher of water. Perhaps most notably: Some of us—let’s call them “the Japanese”—have invented a magical toilet seat, which transforms the act of excretion into a technologically enhanced pleasure ritual.
You may have heard about these Japanese toilet seats. Perhaps you’ve experimented with one on a trip to Tokyo. They boast remote controls, heated seats, and bidet functions. Some models play whooshing white noise in an effort to obscure other, zestier sounds. Toto, the leading brand, introduced its Washlet in 1982, and it’s been estimated that more than 70 percent of Japanese homes now feature a toilet seat with enhanced capabilities. (Meanwhile, only 30 percent have a dishwasher. For the Japanese, washing bottoms takes precedence over washing kitchenware.)
For some reason, we in the United States have not yet boarded this fancy toilet seat train. Toto claims sales of Washlets in North America grow every year and have now reached a rate of “several thousand” each month. But not a single person I know—including folks who pamper themselves in all sorts of other ways—owns a toilet seat with an automated bidet function. My personal experience is that Totos are rare even in the lavatories of luxury hotel rooms.
Given how often we use our toilets, and how much money we happily spend outfitting other corners of our houses with all manner of technologically advanced appliances, the lack of traction here for Toto seems curious. I wondered: What do the Japanese know that we don’t? To find out, I borrowed a top-of-the-line Washlet S350e from Toto and installed it in my bathroom.
Installation was no big deal. You remove your existing toilet seat and replace it with the new one. I did this myself, in about 20 minutes. I did occasionally bump my skull against porcelain, but I managed to shut off the water flow to my toilet tank, unscrew the flexible pipe that connects to the spigot in the wall, and screw in the adaptor valve that Toto provides. Now water would be routed not only to the tank but also to the toilet seat’s bidet nozzle and its separate bowl-cleaning sprayer.
I slid the batteries into the remote control and voila: All at once, my bathroom became a realm of surprise and delight. Press a button and the toilet seat lifts itself, hands free. Press the button again and the seat smoothly descends into place, ready for action. As it senses my approach, the Washlet sprays the inside of the toilet bowl with a preparatory mist of electrolyzed water—ensuring that, as the manual somewhat primly explains, “dirt” will not stick.
Prim readers can avert their eyes here: We now must describe the Washlet’s more intimate functions. Capabilities that one may experience only after one has dropped trou.
First, there is the heated seat. This is the sort of thing you don’t realize you need in your life until you’ve tried it and immediately decide you can no longer live without it. It is truly a pleasure to press your hindflesh to an oval of cozy warmth, instead of receiving a mild, chilly shock. Using the Washlet’s remote, you can adjust the seat’s temperature up or down until your haunches are happy.
When the time comes, the bidet function is also at your command. This is of course the killer app of the Washlet. The “money shot.” What separates the Toto from other toilet seats. It’s also something that we, as Americans, seem to be collectively intimidated by and/or squeamish about.
What lies behind our general discomfort with moist butt-cleaning? Do we feel that dry toilet paper is properly penitent—a fair punishment for our nasty, corporeal doings? Is it that we’re embarrassed to devote special attention to this part of our bodies? That we feel it’s weird or deviant to expend additional time, or money, or effort tending to our backsides? Is it that we’re ashamed to let others see our bidets, as this would imply that we do indeed have anuses and that they are occasionally subpristine?
Look no further than the disappointing sales of moist toilet tissue to see how freaked out we are by the thought of using anything beyond good old dry toilet paper. Cottonelle’s latest ads for its moist, flushable wipes feature a British woman who wants you to “talk about your bum.” Somehow her accent, and her cutesy toddler vocabulary, are defamiliarizing enough to disarm the folks she cajoles in the ads. But the fact that we require a foreign advocate just to make us even consider a moistened wipe is suggestive of the myriad societal obstacles inherent in this mission. And indeed, efforts to market moist toilet paper in America have been a failure so far, according to the research I could find. The stuff represents only 3 percent of U.S. toilet paper sales, and growth has been stagnant. Among American households that do buy moist toilet paper, 54 percent hide it out of sight in a bathroom cabinet—perhaps out of misguided embarrassment—which means it gets used much less often.
People in other parts of the world think we’re insane to use only dry bumwad. Go to South or East Asia, in regions with squat toilets, and you’ll always find a small tub of water or a garden hose (aka the “bum gun”) to spray yourself clean with. Even here, when we change an infant’s diaper, we recognize the utility of moisture. No parent would use dry paper instead of a moist wipe. Yet most of us deny our adult selves this basic comfort.
Toto’s David Krakoff, president of the sales division for Toto USA, makes the case for liquid over mere friction: “You would never consider your hands to be clean if you simply rubbed them on a dry paper towel with no water, and the shower you take every day is useless without water.” And yes, you could just buy the Cottonelle wipes for yourself and be cleaner and happier than the vast majority of your fellow Americans. But I submit that a bidet is the moist wipe writ much awesomer. Hands free, with a steady stream. A pressure washer for your undercarriage. You may augment it with dry paper if you wish, in whichever sequence you desire.
When I had some friends at my apartment last weekend and showed them the Washlet, they were intrigued but admitted their fear of the unknown. Would the spray of water be cold and bracing? Quite the contrary: You can adjust the temperature up or down, emulating a refreshing spring rain or a hot outpour from a teapot. Likewise, you can maneuver the bidet’s cannon forward or back to aim at just the right spot. Buttons on the remote will activate oscillation or pulsation, and raise or lower the intensity of the gush.
I will spare you effusive descriptions of my own experience with the Washlet. But it’s become difficult for me to remember a life without it. And having one at my house has made me wish that the restrooms I encounter elsewhere were all similarly equipped.
(By the way: I live alone, and there never arose an opportune moment to ask a female friend to test and assess the Washlet’s woman-focused bidet function—distinguished as “front” instead of “rear,” and indicated on the remote by a womanly silhouette. I did try it myself out of curiosity. It turns out that no matter where you aim a warm splash of water down there, it feels pretty good. The remote also has a memory function that lets you record his and hers settings for seat warmth and water pulsation and such.)
Now, there is the matter of the price. Which hovers in the mid-$900s on Amazon. That does seem like a lot for a toilet seat. But I think the Washlet is not a ridiculous purchase. I always hear people brag about the fortune they just dropped on a fancy mattress, justifying this expense by noting how much time they spend in bed. The logic pertains when it comes to the bathroom. Think about it: How much would you pay for a whole new feeling of well-being in your nethers?
The problem for Toto: You don’t yet know that you want that nether-feeling. You can’t even conceive of it, until you’ve tried it. Perhaps if sample Washlets were seeded in fine bathrooms all across the country, where folks could experience the transporting joy of a bidet? A showroom with test drives? I confess I do not envy the Toto marketing department. But their cause is just, and I believe, in time, it will wash away all of our doubts.
Nudge
DID you hear the one about the flies in the toilet? They took off, flew round the world, and started a revolution.
It was 1999, and the authorities at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam were looking to cut costs. One of the most expensive jobs was keeping the floor of the men's toilet clean. The obvious solution would have been to post signs politely reminding men not to pee on the floor. But economist Aad Kieboom had an idea: etch a picture of a fly into each urinal. When they tried it, the cleaning bill reportedly fell 80 per cent.
Amsterdam's urinal flies have since become the most celebrated example of a "nudge", or strategy for changing human behaviour on the basis of a scientific understanding of what real people are like – in this case, the fact that men pee straighter if they have something to aim at. The flies are now, metaphorically, all around us.
Rethinking The Bathroom 1
For centuries, the people of London and other big cities got their cooking and washing water from rivers or wells, limiting their consumption to pretty much what they could carry. They dumped their waste into brick-lined cesspits that would be emptied by the night soil men, who sold it as fertilizer or dumped it off Dung Pier into the Thames. Liquid waste might be thrown into gutters in the middle of the road.
In 1854, in the middle of a cholera epidemic in London, Dr John Snow mapped where victims died and found that the deaths seemed concentrated around one of those pumps, at 37 Broad Street. When he had the handle removed from the pump, the cholera epidemic stopped immediately. He had made the first verifiable connection between human waste and disease.
After people realised that excrement plus drinking water equals death, parliament passed the Metropolitan Water Act to “make provision for securing the supply to the metropolis of pure and wholesome water”. Public pumps were replaced with pipes delivering water directly to homes.
For centuries standing pumps were the main source of fresh water for cities. Photograph: Bridgeman Art
This was perhaps the greatest, but now undervalued, convenience. Instead of carrying water, suddenly everyone had as much as they could use, all the time, with the turn of a tap. Not surprisingly, according to Abby Rockefeller in Civilization and Sludge, the average water use per person went quickly from three gallons of water per person to 30 and perhaps as much as 100 gallons per person.
The toilet was an almost trivial addition; it had been around for a while (John Harington, a member of Elizabeth I’s privy council invented a flush toilet, but there is no evidence that she ever tried it) but was pretty useless without a water supply. But it became incredibly convenient to just to wash the poop away. Except now there was more faecal effluence than anyone knew what to do with, overflowing the cesspits and flowing into the gutters and sewers originally designed for rainwater that all led to the Thames. The result was even more cholera and disease.
The environmentalists of the day tried to stop this; they promoted earth toilets that would keep human waste separate, that would treat it as a resource. Rockefeller writes: “The engineers were divided again between those who believed in the value of human excreta to agriculture and those who did not. The believers argued in favour of 'sewage farming', the practice of irrigating neighbouring farms with municipal sewage. The second group, arguing that 'running water purifies itself' (the more current slogan among sanitary engineers: 'the solution to pollution is dilution'), argued for piping sewage into lakes, rivers, and oceans.”
But they never really had a chance to debate the issue; it was a done deal as people rushed to install convenient flush toilets. Soon every contaminated stream and gutter was being enlarged and covered over and turned into what remains today’s urban sewer system. In the Guardian, Blake Morrison described it as being “on a par, aesthetically, with the canal bridges and railway viaducts of the Victorian era". But it was really just going with the flow instead of thinking about the consequences.
Inside our houses, the architects and homeowners of the late 19th century were as confused as the engineers about what to do. People had washstands in their bedrooms, so at first they just stuck sinks and taps into them, and put the toilet into whatever closet in the hall or space under the stairs that they could find, hence the “water closet.” They quickly realised that it didn’t make a lot of sense to run plumbing to every bedroom when it was cheaper to bring it all to one place, and the idea of the bathroom was born. Since the early adopters, then as now, were the rich with a few rooms to spare, they were often lavish, with all the fixtures encased in wood like the commodes they replaced.
As germ theory became accepted at the end of the 19th century, the bathroom became a hospital room, with fixtures of porcelain and lined with tile or marble. These materials are expensive; as the bathroom became mainstream and accessible to all classes, it got smaller. The plumbers lined everything up in a row to use less pipe. By about 1910 the bathroom is pretty much indistinguishable from the ones built today.
Nobody seriously paused to think about the different functions and their needs; they just took the position that if water comes in and water goes out, it is all pretty much the same and should be in the same room. Nobody thought about how the water from a shower or bathtub (greywater) is different from the water from a toilet (blackwater); it all just went down the same drain which connected to the same sewer pipe that gathered the rainwater from the streets, and carried it away to be dumped in the river or lake.
It is hard to find something that we actually got right in the modern bathroom. The toilet is too high (our bodies were designed to squat), the sink is too low and almost useless; the shower is a deathtrap (an American dies every day from bath or shower accidents). We fill this tiny, inadequately ventilated room with toxic chemicals ranging from nail polish to tile cleaners. We flush the toilet and send bacteria into the air, with our toothbrush in a cup a few feet away. We take millions of gallons of fresh water and contaminate it with toxic chemicals, human waste, antibiotics and birth control hormones in quantities large enough to change the gender of fish.
We mix up all our bodily functions in a machine designed by engineers on the basis of the plumbing system, not human needs. The result is a toxic output of contaminated water, questionable air quality and incredible waste. We just can’t afford to do it this way any more.
What could the bathroom of the future look like?
Tamsin Oglesby’s play The War Next Door opened to mixed reviews in 2007; one critic said “the shoddy script and hammy acting left me so bored that I contemplated impaling myself on my biro". However, one prop got worldwide attention, as noted in the synopsis: “Sophie and Max are a thoroughly modern British couple, cosmopolitan, open-minded. They’ve even constructed their own eco loo (well, it does save 30 litres of water a day).”
That’s seriously open-minded, having a composting toilet in a London home. It also does a lot more than just save 30 litres of water; it eliminates blackwater (contaminated with faeces) as distinct from greywater, what comes out of our sinks, laundries and showers, which can be reused in the garden. Lots of people are doing greywater diversion and using it to flush their toilets, but that just turns it black. A composting toilet is a much more grand gesture, that people will resist; I was once told that: “No one will want this inside their house. I know this, because I still have a few teeth in my head and a few friends in town.”
Perhaps. However, if we are going to do something about the incredible waste of water that is the modern bathroom, radical changes may be required. A lot of Britons are proud of going net-zero or off-grid with their electricity and energy supply; it’s time to consider going off-pipe too. According to the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (Post): “Over 10bn litres of sewage are produced every day in England and Wales. It takes approximately 6.34 GW hours of energy to treat this volume of sewage, almost 1% of the average daily electricity consumption of England and Wales.” You’re not net-zero if you are flushing your waste into the sewer.
Composting toilets are not yet flush-and-forget like a conventional loo, but they are getting close. There are vacuum toilets that suck it all away to the composter using almost no water; there are foam flush toilets that are almost indistinguishable from conventional bowls. Companies such as Clivus Multrum supply not only the toilet and the composter, but also a service of emptying it, just like the night soil men did 200 years ago.
Shower like the Japanese
The other source of waste and inefficiency is the shower. They are designed so badly; the shower heads aim down, when really, like a bidet, they should probably aim up. The water runs constantly, even when you are applying soap or shampoo. You are usually standing in a slippery dangerous tub or in a tiny stall where you cannot move out of the water stream. People who care about water waste, either for cost or environmental reasons, take short showers or have miserable low flow shower heads. It’s just not fun.
In Japan, you sit on a stool and have a bucket, sponge, ladle and hand shower that you only turn on when you need it. You can sit comfortably for as long as you like, in no danger of slipping, use the ladle or the hand shower to rinse. It’s really a lovely experience. It uses 10% of the water compared to a normal shower. If you do follow up with a hot bath, at least the water is shared among the whole family.
When thinking about the bathroom of the future, we should look more closely at the Japanese bathrooms of the past. They kept their water supply and their waste management far apart, and rarely had epidemics of typhoid or cholera. They would never think of putting the toilet in the same room as the tub. Instead of treating bathing as a chore, they turned it into a truly enjoyable ritual.
The Japanese used to sell their excrement; the rich got more money for theirs because they had better diets and made better quality fertilizer. They farmed more intensively and had fewer farm animals, (as we probably should) and needed a lot of it. In China, the proverb said: “Treasure night soil as if it were gold.” It was valuable stuff then and still is today.
In a world where we are running out of fresh water, making artificial fertilizer from fossil fuels and approaching peak phosphorus, it is idiotic and almost criminal that we pay huge amounts in taxes to use drinking water to flush away our personal fertilizer and phosphorus and dump it in the ocean. In the future, they should be paying us.
Rethinking The Bathroom 2
A few months ago, I peed in - or, I suppose, into - one of America’s best restrooms. This fact is not disputable, but also not all that laudable.
The bathroom was at the Field Museum in Chicago, and the large plaque hanging outside the entrance gave it that particular title. The plaque was the result of its winning the 2011 edition of the America’s Best Restroom contest, a nationwide search for, well, you get it. The contest was developed by Cintas, a company that “designs, manufactures and implements corporate identity uniform programs, and provides entrance mats, restroom cleaning and supplies, tile and carpet cleaning, promotional products, first aid, safety, fire protection products and services for businesses.” The contest is an attempt to link Cintas with quality hygienic products, and has been taking place for the past 13 years. Ever relieved yourself in the bathroom inside University of Notre Dame’s main building? Then you did so in—or, into—the contest’s first winner.
Throughout the year, survey manager Danny Rubin sifts through the mountain of nominees, some emailed in, some scouted personally. “We look for articles about restrooms, sometimes go on Yelp or Pinterest,” Rubin says. From there, he trims the nominations to a final 10. “You know it when you see it,” he says. “That goes for bathrooms and everything else in life.” Then, it’s left up to online voters to decide the ultimate winner. (In case you’re interested in weighing in, voting closes on Halloween.)
This year’s nominees include an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles, two different tiki bars, a bathroom on a hiking trail outside of Austin, and an American Girl store in Chicago. The winning establishment gets a modest press conference, the aforementioned plaque, and a theoretical rise in foot traffic from those looking to utilize the renowned facilities. “It can often be a marketing case for your establishment,” Rubin says. “They come to visit because they just have to see the bathroom.” It remains to be seen how janitors feel about this award.
There is not one specific quality linking the winners, or even the nominees. Notre Dame’s winning bathroom has tile floors imported from England. The Field Museum’s is spacious and well-lit, with elegant curves of modern architecture. Chicago’s American Girl bathroom has custom-made “doll holders” in each stall, so you can avoid soiling your new purchase. But the one thing they all have in common: Despite being aesthetically pleasing, they’re designed terribly. And that’s because nearly all of America’s restrooms are wrong.
IN 1976, CORNELL UNIVERSITY professor of architecture Alexander Kira published The Bathroom, a treatise on the history and state of bathroom construction. “All the world’s religions, in all their branchings and shadings, have had viewpoints and teachings on the body, sex, birth, death, illness, menstruation, elimination, and cleansing,” he wrote in the introduction. All these factors have contributed, and continue to contribute, he argued, to what we’ve come to know as “the bathroom.”
At their core, bathrooms—throughout history—have needed to contain only two things: “A container for holding water for washing and a container for holding body wastes, which were ultimately disposed of in one of two ways—by return to the soil or by washing away with water.” In the case of castles this meant constructing pipes to transport the waste outside the walls, generally into the surrounding moat. (As Kira points out, swimming through moats was a much more heroic act in reality than movies make it out to be.) So while restrooms can be gussied up with any number of design flourishes, there are three key elements that must exist: The sink, a shower-bathtub, and the toilet. We’ll start with the most important.
The toilet, according to Kira, is “the most ill-suited fixture ever designed.” Why? Mostly because of how we sit.
Despite what certain videos would have you believe, there are basically two ways for humans to defecate: The “hunched-over” pose, with two feet firmly planted on the ground, body bent forward, and the “squat” method, wherein the knees are up near the armpits, the buttocks at the same level as the feet. (The latter, mind you, should not be confused with the hovering-over-the-toilet-seat pose of the same name, the one utilized in gross toilet situations.) Our toilets have been designed with the former position in mind, and therefore it is the norm.
Unfortunately, that style has negative implications for what’s going on inside our bodies during defecation, specifically our sphincter’s alignment with the receptacle into which the goods are being delivered. (To get a sense of what hunching does, imagine a garden hose, then imagine a kink.) The stats bear this out. According to a 2003 study in Digestive Diseases and Sciences, defecators using the hunched-over posture take an average of 130 seconds to move their bowels. Squatters only take 51 seconds.
In other words: We’re pooping all wrong. And the toilets are to blame.
While certain items can be purchased to fix to this failure of design—there’s a line of “toilet steps” that can be placed at your feet to allow for more proper positioning—that’s like buying a huge magnifying glass for the TV. Maybe we should design a bigger set, instead.
As far as the failure of sink design goes, all one needs to do is leave your home sink uncleaned for, say, a few weeks. For a tool that has the sole job of cleaning and then getting rid of the soiled water, it sure allows unwanted gunk to build up easily. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Kira’s update of the sink calls for an arching spout—similar to a water fountain—that projects from a deeper back end toward a closer, shallow end, with a hump carved on the surface between them. The spout allows for easy hair-washing, while the hump gives the water a curved landed pad that diverts it into cascading streams that flow directly into the drain, keeping the basin clear of gunk.
Kira’s design also calls for the sink to be set higher than we’re used to in order to allow users to stand straight rather than hunching down to the lowest common height. Know how men’s public restrooms have urinals of differing heights? That’s not only for reasons of hilarity when a man loses a round of musical urinals. It’s also a blueprint for how sinks should be designed.
The shower/bath portion, meanwhile, has no place in the current state of American restrooms. Beyond the cold blocks of industrialized concrete that make up the showering facilities of public pools, group bathing has virtually no place in our culture anymore. But it’s worth pointing out that this is a relatively new phenomenon. Bathing was a public enterprise in Roman days, then it shifted to neighborhood or apartment building-style baths, until ultimately turning into the one-person or one-family private facility that is the norm in First World countries. As Kira notes, that shift was entirely based on the availability of water, which is to say the availability of money. Currently, both currencies are quite precarious, making a return to public bathing more an inevitability than a possibility.
But perhaps the biggest problem with America’s restrooms is not the poor design of the items within, but the key item that’s missing.
According to New York University professor Harvey Molotch, it has something to do with how Americans were first exposed to the invention. They were developed by French inventors in the 18th century, which lent them an air of “hedonism and sensuality” that didn’t jive with American Puritanical sensibilities during that era. Later on, they were hit with another negative bout of publicity when World War II soldiers returned home telling tales of water-based contraptions that were used to wash one’s genitals after a night in a brothel. “Three out of four Parisian prostitutes agree,” isn’t a particularly deft advertisement.
But there are two significant reasons bidets should re-enter our bathroom conversation. Despite the fact they seem to waste water, bidets actually use less of it than toilet paper. According to Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger, the creation of one roll of toilet paper actually demands 37 gallons of water (in addition to 1.5 pounds of wood and 1.3Kwh of electricity). One roll, in this case, is 500 sheets of two-ply. Seeing as the average consumer uses 8.6 sheets per trip, in all that’s 37 gallons over 58 trips. Bidets only use about one-eighth of a gallon per use, or 37 gallons for 296 trips.
But despite the country’s worrisome drought, that factor actually gets second billing. The bidet’s most important feature is its highly effective posterior cleansing. As Kira liked to continually mention, an old study in Britain found that 44 percent of the population walked around with dirty underwear. “Many are prepared to complain about a tomato sauce stain on a restaurant tablecloth, whilst they luxuriate on a plush seat in their faecially stained pants,” Kira wrote.
We are a nation of skid marks. Bidets would, hopefully, solve our long, national nightmare.
And yet throughout the list of nominees for America’s Best Restroom, there’s not a bidet in sight. This oversight, along with all the other general failures of American bathroom design, makes the contest nothing more than a “best of the worst.” Until the country shifts its bathroom philosophy and places the eradication of “faecially stained pants” on a higher level of importance than “a doll holder for every stall,” that fact will remain so.
Inflight Farting
Jacob Rosenberg’s interest with in-flight flatulence began on a long-haul trip to a New Zealand. He looked down at his stomach and it seemed to have visibly grown since he stepped on the plane. When he opened his bag and saw his empty bottle of water this made sense. The bottle had expanded in the low pressure and then crumpled as the plane reached the ground. The gases in his stomach, he realised, must have been doing exactly the same thing.
"Since then, I’ve noticed just how much flatulence you have on a flight,” he says. “Which is very much.”
While hardly comparable to the effects of outside turbulence, wind inside planes is a common complaint. “When you talk to people, they have all experienced a bad odour at some time,” says Rosenberg, who is a clinical professor at the University of Copenhagen. But it was only once he was back on the ground and having a few drinks with his colleagues that he began to think seriously about the scientific consequences of this. The result was a paper that might just suggest ways to relieve our discomfort on flights.
Even on the ground, we all pass a surprising quantity of gas every day. According to one estimate, the average person breaks wind 10 times every 24 hours, expelling about 1 litre in total. The gases are brewed from food that has failed to be absorbed by the gut, and so is fermented by bacteria, which produce nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen – along with more odorous, sulphurous compounds.
It may be a universal experience, but as Rosenberg combed the medical literature, he found that there are some surprisingly prevalent misconceptions surrounding our wind. Despite popular belief, studies show men are not more flatulent than women, for example (though they may be more public about it); in fact the same study from the late 90s found women’s flatulence has a higher concentration of the smelly sulphurous compounds, and was rated as having a more potent odour by a few unlucky judges. And although beans may be known “as the musical fruit”, a recent experiment found that it is not nearly as inflammatory as most would believe, and its effects differ widely from person to person. Foods known to reduce flatulence include fish, rice, dairy products, fish and strained fruit juice – since they leave less waste in the gut for fermentation.
Bloated pilots
But if our flatulence on ground level passes mostly unnoticed (or is at least politely ignored) in day-to-day life, it can become something of an unwanted companion in the confines of an air cabin. Its frequency on planes is simple physics, Rosenberg says. “The pressure drops and the air must expand into more space.” That 1 litre of gas now needs to fill a 30% bigger volume, leading to that nasty bloating feeling. This seems to be a regular problem for pilots – more than 60% report feeling regular abdominal bloating, much higher than the average for office workers.
You could just try to hold it in, of course, but that’s not necessarily a wise idea; besides the discomfort, Rosenberg thinks there could be a slight risk. “If you are young and healthy it’s not a problem, but for a frail old person, it may put strain on cardiac function,” he says.
Nasa was once concerned that astronauts' flatulence would be lethal in the confines of a spacecraft (STR/AFP/Getty Images)
Freeing the wind has its own potential problems at altitude: one paper from 1969 highlighted the risk of a fireball arising from astronauts’ wind, held in high concentration in the space cabin. Thankfully, no such accidents have been recorded so far. Even so, a team from the Canadian Space Agency recently suggested that fermented soy may be the perfect space food, since it is packed with probiotic bacteria that could compete with the wind-producing microbes – reducing the astronauts’ bloating.
While the worst-case scenario on aeroplanes may be discomfort or embarrassment, airlines have already taken some action. As part of his research for his paper, Rosenberg interviewed aeroplane engineers at Copenhagen, and he found that many airlines already use charcoal filters in the air conditioning. Charcoal is highly porous and has been shown to readily absorb a range of odours – so the filters stop the sulphurous fumes from recirculating around the cabin. Airlines also tend to make sure the in-flight food is low in fibre, but high in carbohydrates – a balance that is more likely to calm our digestion. It’s not clear when or how they came to these decisions – but we can guess that Brussels sprouts and cabbage left the in-flight menu at a fairly early point in aviation history.
Charcoal underpants
Even so, Rosenberg’s personal feeling is that more could be done – particularly since no smoking policies have made other odours more easily discernible. It may be possible to place charcoal within the seats themselves, he suggests – though previous studies have suggested that is not particularly effective, perhaps because most trousers and skirts create a “tunnel effect” that direct the fumes away from the cushion. Instead, he thinks that airlines would do better to use blankets with charcoal woven into the fabric. For people who are especially worried about their own flatulence, he points out that you can now buy underwear designed along similar principles; the American Journal of Gastroenterology reports that charcoal-lined underwear absorbs nearly 100% of the odour, compared to removable (and reusable) pads placed within trousers, which only absorb about 70%.
Rosenberg has some other, more tongue-in-cheek suggestions. The flatulent are more likely to release tell-tale gases resulting from food fermentation through their oesophagus and out of their mouth, which means that certain devices can provide a breath test for people harbouring something in their colon. Airlines could, feasibly, screen passengers at check-in and place you in a special section of the plane, near the toilets – or simply ban entry.
As unpleasant as inflight flatulence is, it would be an extreme solution to, let’s face it, a trivial issue. So perhaps the best answer is just to lose our embarrassment. As Rosenberg says, “Farting is not a rare problem, but we just don’t talk about it”. Let’s hope his paper has gone a little way to remedying that.
Thames Super Sewer
The £4.2 billion Thames Tideway is controversial. Many have questioned whether the new 15½-mile super sewer under the Thames is necessary. Others complain that the cost of the tunnel will add £40 to £80 to the average Thames Water bill during the next five years. More grumble that customers are being asked to contribute anything at all to the cost because Thames Water paid no tax last year and, for several years, has paid hundreds of millions of pounds in dividends to its largely foreign shareholders.
The latter is something of a non-issue, though, because Thames Tideway will be a separate company from Thames Water once the competitive procurement process to identify the infrastructure providers that will build the tunnel has been completed in May. Thames Water simply has set up the company and launched the procurement process.
The arguments in favour of the tunnel are equally well rehearsed: the Victorian sewers, built by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, were designed for a population of four million. London’s population has hit an all-time high of 8.9 million and is projected to rise to 16 million by 2160. Decisions must be made now to prepare for that increase and the strain it will place on the existing water and sewage network.
There’s also the environmental aspect. Drop a rubber duck into the river in Hammersmith at high tide and, by low tide, it will have floated all the way to Tower Hill. Then, when the tide comes, it will float all the way back to about 300 yards from where it started. Now imagine that with the 55 million tonnes of sewage pumped into the river last year. It takes approximately three months for sewage to be washed out to sea, which affects all the fish and other wildlife living in and around the river.
Once the Thames Tideway opens, in 2023, it is expected that it will take only three months for the river to be more or less free of sewage. This, remember, is a river that, even after Bazalgette’s sewers rid London of its “great stink”, continued to be abused for decades with sewage and industrial effluent and, in 1957, was declared biologically dead.
There are other arguments for the tunnel that are less well-rehearsed. Enter Andy Mitchell, the chief executive of Thames Tideway, who is evangelical about the opportunity created by the tunnel to regenerate great swathes of the capital.
Mr Mitchell, who was named chief executive a year ago, was previously in charge of Crossrail, which, he says, was much easier to sell to its neighbours. People were quite happy to tolerate months of disruption and construction work, provided they were able to continue their daily business largely unfettered, because there was a tangible prize in the form of the value of their home rising sharply. People living near the Thames Tideway, by contrast, will not experience any such property uplift.
Yet the public benefits could be just as great. Mr Mitchell points out, for example, that 300 maritime jobs will be created to ferry the earth dug up in the tunnelling process. That earth and spoil largely will be transported up the river, in the process quadrupling the traffic on it, but also providing 300 people with skills that, later, could be used in operating public transport on the Thames.
Other jobs will be created in building the tunnel and in enhancing the skills base. Tunnelling work is to begin just as it comes to an end on Crossrail, while, Mr Mitchell notes, the two projects will equip a generation of young British engineers with crucial experience in an activity for which there will be strong global demand. It is making the UK one of the hottest locations for young engineers to learn their trade.
Drying Your Hands
Dyson hand dryers may have the virtue, surprisingly rare in the hand dryer market, of actually drying your hands, but could their ability to disperse water efficiently also mean inadvertently dispersing infection?
A study of different methods of hand drying has found that if a hand dryer is powerful enough to dry, it is also powerful enough to contaminate.
Using a paper towel meant that any microbes not removed by washing found their way straight into the bin, but using a Dyson Airblade scattered them far and wide.
Scientists at the University of Westminster investigated four different hand drying methods: paper towels, roller towels, normal warm air dryers, and Dyson Airblades.
People dipped gloved hands into a suspension of yeast and then dried them. While they did so, plates of agar were placed at different distances from the drying to see how much yeast ended up growing on them.
With the Dyson, the agar plate that was placed 20cm away recorded 67 separate colonies of yeast, and an average of 11 at 1.5m away.
With the paper towels, seven were recorded 20cm away, and none at 1.5m away.
The results of the experiment were published in the Journal of Hospital Infection.
The research, paid for by hand towel manufacturers, is the latest attack in a continuing battle between the industry and Dyson.
Dyson has responded to similar accusations in the past by pointing out that its dryers produce two thirds less CO2 than paper towels, and also that they filter the air as they dry and so potentially actually make bathrooms cleaner.
The World Is Covered In Poop
A foul and disgusting idea surfaced last week, one of those things you wish you could instantly unlearn: Men’s beards are, it seems, as “dirty as toilets” and crawling with “poop particles,” according to a study by a New Mexico lab, which the Cut reported on yesterday (though the thing has been pretty much debunked at this point).
But, really, to focus on beards is to miss the point, said an unimpressed Phillip M. Tierno, a microbiologist at New York University and the author of The Secret Life of Germs. “We, as a society, are literally bathed in feces,” Tierno said. “Wherever a man touches, there are feces and fecal organisms present.” Even to focus on toilets is to sort of miss the point: One study compared surfaces in the bathrooms and kitchens of 15 homes and found that the toilet was among the least bacteria-laden places tested, likely because people tend to more vigorously and regularly clean their toilets.
Fecal bacteria can be found in many of the places you don't expect, but not so much in the places you do. To wit, here are some stomach-churning examples:
At the office:
A British microbiologist found traces of feces on the keyboards of two employees in a London office. And Charles A. Gerba, a University of Arizona microbiologist who has conducted dozens of these sorts of gross-out germ studies, has said that according to his research, 40 percent of office coffee mugs contain coliform bacteria, which can be found in feces.
In the kitchen:
Studies in the home environment suggest one reason swabs of office coffee mugs reveal some vile stuff: The thing you use to clean it — the everyday kitchen sponge — is one of the germiest objects you own. A 1998 study in The Journal of Applied Microbiology, co-authored by Gerba, examined the kitchens and bathrooms of 14 homes over 30 weeks. The results were about the opposite of what you might expect:“The highest concentrations of faecal coliforms ... were found in the sponge/ dishcloth and in the kitchen sink drain area while the lowest concentrations were found on the bathroom counter top, on the bathroom floor and on the toilet seat," the authors write.
Also, the cutting board you use to prepare your beautiful, Instagram-worthy meals is likely filthy, too. Gerba has said the cutting boards he's tested have, on average, about twice as much fecal bacteria as what's found on toilet seats.
On you:
Another Gerba examination of 26 shoes found fecal bacteria on all but one. The bag or purse you carry around can pick up fecal matter, too, most often on the bottoms; the germs usually find their way there if you set your bag down on a public restroom floor. And — this will surprise no one — your phone is pretty gross: A recent study from London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine researchers found fecal matter on one in six cellphones they swabbed. That same study found fecal bacteria on 16 percent of the 390 hands tested.
Oh, and then there's this: "There's about a tenth of a gram of poop in the average pair of underwear," Gerba once told ABC News.
In a hotel room:
University of Houston researchers examined nine hotel rooms in three states, and found fecal bacteria on the following: the TV remote, the lamp switch by the bed, the toilet, the bathroom sink, and the sponges and mops on the housekeepers' carts.
And pretty much everywhere else:
Climbing gyms appear to have, as one microbiologist delicately phrased it, a "fecal veneer," an ever-so-light coating of poo covering the indoor climbing walls, according to a small 2014 study published in Current Microbiology. Gerba has found fecal matter on 72 percent of 85 shopping carts tested at grocery stores in five major metropolitan areas in the U.S.
Saving the unthinkably worst for last, there is likely fecal matter in the very air around us, at least in the winter, found a team of biologists in 2011. In Applied and Environmental Biology, they write, "fecal material, most likely dog feces, often represents an unexpected source of bacteria in the atmosphere at more urbanized locations during the winter."
There's no escaping it, in other words. "No matter who you are, I can culture your body and find fecal organisms, part of your natural skin flora," Tierno said. "Even if you’re fastidious and clean, you cannot wash it away.”
And that's fine. We're all walking around, breathing and covered in a fine veneer of poo and yet we're all (probably!) going to be fine, assures Tierno. “You don’t get sick from feces, per se. It’s only an indicator that there may be pathogenic organisms found,” Tierno said. “It’s disingenuous for people to equate feces with getting ill." You can get sick from touching or (oh, God) ingesting fecal matter if that fecal matter contains something like salmonella or shigella — and if that's the case, even a little bit is enough to get you sick, said Kelly Reynolds, a University of Arizona microbiologist. "Many fecally transmitted microbes can cause disease at very low levels (1–10 organisms)," she said in an email. "Since they are typically shed at very high numbers (tens of billions per gram of feces), even small amounts are enough to make people sick."
Still, Tierno argues, the chances that the fecal matter is pathogenic are low, and you can cut that risk even further if you wash your hands adequately. (That's soap and water for 20 seconds; you can mentally sing the "Happy Birthday" song to yourself twice, if that's easier.)
Just use common sense, is the gist of Tierno's advice. While there's no need to freak out about the poop-splattered world we're all apparently living in, there's also no need to get lax about hand or home hygiene. Don't eat something right after using something a zillion other people have touched that day, like an ATM. Wash your hands as often as you can, and use hand sanitizer when you can't. And clean your damn apartment regularly, vacuuming and sweeping the floors and wiping down surfaces. Tierno puts things in perspective this way: "There are people who are ingesting fecal organisms all the time when they practice various sexual positions. You don’t get sick from that," Tierno said. “I don’t think I have to go into detail for you.”
Japanese Toilets
They warm the buttocks on chilly days, and cool them with a cleansing water jet as the weather warms. They flush automatically and their control panels would not be out of place in a spacecraft’s cockpit.
They are Japan’s hi-tech lavatories and they are the latest weapon in the country’s battle to boost its economy.
The government of Shinzo Abe, the prime minister, yesterday announced the “Japan toilet challenge”, a campaign to use lavatories to improve the quality of life. Among its ideas are prizes for the best and most innovative designs and a building scheme to reduce queues outside ladies’ washrooms.
“Excretion is to do with the dignity of a human being,” declares the manifesto drawn up by a government committee. “It greatly affects quality of life.”
The plan is being led by Haruko Arimura, Japan’s minister for the empowerment of women, who announced the Japan Toilet Prize.
“This award will expedite our efforts to build a comfortable environment for the [2020 Tokyo] Olympics and be a showcase for Japanese hospitality. It will be given to ladies’ toilets that cleverly reduce queues and make them easier to use for tourists.” Since the first model, the Washlet, appeared in 1980, with the slogan, “Don’t Let People Say Behind Your Back That You Have a Dirty Bottom”, automated wash lavatories have come to dominate Japanese bathrooms.
Three quarters of homes have one and Toto, the largest manufacturer, has sold more than 30 million units.
As well as a heating element in the seat, a water spraying bidet nozzle and a built in blow dryer, the most sophisticated models have lids that open and close automatically, and speakers playing the sound of water to drown out any embarrassing noises. However, many public conveniences in railway stations and parks still have the traditional “squat” toilet — an enamel trench over which many Britons hover nervously.
As part of the toilet challenge, administrators of public facilities will be encouraged to upgrade to hi-tech lavatories, adorning them with advertisements to cover the cost of more than £1,000 for a top-of-the-range model.
A certification system will grade tourist businesses according to the excellence of their conveniences.
“Ms Arimura intends to summon various experts on toilets,” Akito Yokoyama, a member of the committee, told the Weekly Shincho magazine. “She said to us, ‘I don’t mind if you call me Minister of Toilets — I want to fix public lavatories.’ She’s really determined.”
For all their domestic success, bottom-washing lavatories have never caught on abroad. This is partly because of rules restricting the installation of electrical sockets in bathrooms; however, many Westerners also have an instinctive squeamishness at the Washlet’s intimate administrations.
The hope is that exposure to hi-tech toilets will win converts among visitors to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. This would vindicate the Washlet’s early advertising slogan: “Your bottom will like it after only three tries.”
Loo With a View at Glastonbury
It is likely you have never dreamt of sitting on the lavatory in the middle of a Somerset field, happily watching Lionel Richie with your trousers round your ankles. If you have, then Glastonbury is the place for you this year.
A toilet cubicle with a see-through door will allow fans to enjoy acts on the festival’s Pyramid Stage while answering the call of nature — although the two-way mirror means that those on the outside will be faced only with their own reflection.
The “loo with a view” is the brainchild of WaterAid, one of Glastonbury’s main partners. Chris Wainwright, a spokesman for the charity, said: “It is a light-hearted way of raising awareness of a serious issue — the fact that a third of the world’s population have no choice but to go in the open.
“This installation will allow a brief glimpse into the lives of those who often suffer the indignity of being stared at, harassed or even attacked.”
The Man With Perfect Poo
It’s the middle of the day for Eric, a 24-year-old research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and nature is calling. Eric leaves his job and hops a train. Then a bus. Then he walks some more. He passes countless toilets, and he needs to use them, but he doesn’t.
Eventually, Eric arrives at a nondescript men’s room 30 minutes away from MIT. A partition separates two toilets. There’s a square-tiled floor like in any public restroom. It’s unremarkable in every way, with one exception: A pit stop here can save lives.
Eric hangs a plastic collection bucket down inside the toilet bowl and does his business. When he’s finished, he puts a lid on the container, bags it up and walks his stool a few doors down the hall to OpenBiome, a small laboratory northwest of Boston that has developed a way to turn poop from extremely healthy people into medicine for really sick patients.
A lab technician weighs Eric’s “sample.” Over the past 2½ months, Eric has generated 10.6 pounds of poop over 29 visits, enough feces to produce 133 treatments for patients suffering from Clostridium difficile, an infection that kills 15,000 Americans a year and sickens half a million.
To donate, Eric had to pass a 109-point clinical assessment. There is a laundry list of factors that would disqualify a donor: obesity, illicit drug use, antibiotic use, travel to regions with high risk of contracting diseases, even recent tattoos. His stools and blood also had to clear a battery of laboratory screenings to make sure he didn’t have any infections.
After all that screening, only 3% of prospective donors are healthy enough to give. “I had no idea,” he says about his poop. “It turns out that it’s fairly close to perfect.”
And that, unlike most people’s poop, makes Eric’s worth money. OpenBiome pays its 22 active donors $40 per sample. They’re encouraged to donate often, every day if they can. Eric has earned about $1,000.
“It takes us a lot of time and effort to find these donors,” says OpenBiome’s research director, Mark Smith. “When we do find them, we want to keep them as engaged as possible and really want to compensate them for their time.”
Why is Eric’s poop so valuable?
A hundred trillion bacteria live inside your gut, some good, some bad. When patients take antibiotics for infections, sometimes they fail to work; good bacteria gets killed off while bad bacteria — C. difficile — grows unchecked.
The life-saving bacteria from the guts of people like Eric can help. When their healthy microbes are placed inside the intestines of a sick person they can chase out harmful C. difficile bacteria. It’s called a fecal transplant. The treatments are administered bottom-up, through a colonoscopy, or top-down, through a tube in the nose.
OpenBiome’s poop donors have created about 5,000 treatments, and the organization says the results have been stunning. Stinky human waste is an astonishingly simple cure: 90% of the patients get better.
“They’ll actually have this really transformational experience where they’ll be going to the bathroom 20 times a day and then have normal bowel movements sort of immediately or the next day,” Smith says.
The organization’s fecal transplants cost $385 to purchase and are providing a treatment to more than 350 hospitals in 47 states.
At OpenBiome’s lab, technician Christina Kim, working under a fume hood that sucks up odors, pulls the lid off Eric’s collection bucket and demonstrates how she turns poop into the life-saving treatment.
“It’s nice that this room is actually closed off because this is where the smelly part happens,” she says.
She examines the consistency of today’s offering. A nearby chart has descriptions and illustrations for seven types of stools. It was developed by a hospital in Bristol, England, as a visual guide.
Not all poop is acceptable.
Types one or two, defined by the Bristol Stool Chart as “like nuts” or “lumpy,” are too dry to process into a treatment.
If a donor’s stool is “mushy” or “watery” — that’s a type six or seven — then it can’t be used because it could be a sign the donor has a gastrointestinal infection.
The perfect poop is type three, which is “like a sausage but with cracks on its surface;” type four, which is “like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft;” or type five, “soft blobs with clear-cut edges (passed easily).”
“It’s actually an established medical chart,” Kim says with a chuckle. “It’s very important.”
Maybe it was the hot sauce he used on his quinoa and cheddar cheese casserole last night, or the banana and peanut butter he ate with a bowl of bran flakes and almond milk for breakfast, but Eric’s stool is type five, just barely acceptable for processing.
Kim scoops the feces into a clear plastic bag and adds a saline solution. For two minutes the bag sloshes around inside a machine called the “jumbo mix.” The fiber in Eric’s stool is filtered out, and what’s left behind is a liquid teaming with helpful bacteria.
With a pipette, Kim transfers the watery remnants of Eric’s poop into 250 ml plastic bottles. On average, one stool donation fills four, but today Eric’s impressive half-pound sample fills seven. One bottle equals one treatment.
The 133 treatments Eric has provided won’t be distributed until he’s passed a secondary healthy screening. For now, they sit frozen in quarantine inside a giant freezer.
Most donors head on their way after handing over their sample, but during today’s visit Eric asks if he can see the treatments he helped create.
Cool air blasts his face as Kim opens the freezer. His jaw drops at the sight of his icy brown bottles, which look like frozen chocolate milkshakes. The bacteria inside them is still alive, cryogenically preserved at -112°F.
“That’s fantastic! Holy cow!” Eric says, beaming. “It’s unreal. I never thought I would be staring at my poop frozen in a freezer destined to help people across the country. It’s really cool.”
But did he do it for the money? The ridiculously easy money?
“Not at all,” he says. “It’s a nice perk, of course.”
If you’re inspired to donate like Eric, you have to live in the Boston area. And you may have to wait. Some 6,000 people have already signed up. OpenBiome usually invites about 50 people for interviews every week.
“It’s easier to get into MIT and Harvard than it is to get enrolled as one of our donors,” Smith says. “A lot of our donors are pretty excited to take something they do every day otherwise and save people’s lives with it.”
Poop Myths
People look down their noses at the topic of poop, and that lets some people dump some false information about one of the most common human activities into the general discourse.
Fortunately, the folks at Prevention talked to some gastroenterologists who are full of the facts, and now you can unload some of the myths you’ve been clinging to about when and how to go.
First off: Going once a day? That’s a myth Dr. Kyle Staller, a Massachusetts General Hospital gastroenterologist, tells Prevention. Less than three times a week is considered abnormal, he says, but other than that, anything that “doesn’t impact your quality of life” can be fine. Holding it in is said to be harmful, but it really isn’t, Dr. Patricia Raymond, of the Eastern Virginia Medical School, tells Prevention. Waiting until there’s “a socially acceptable time and place” to go is a good thing. Just don’t do it all the time, Staller says. By waiting, Staller says, you constipate yourself, or weaken the muscles you use to poop. Don’t worry about the smell, Raymond says. If the smell suddenly changes, that could be a sign of a digestion problem. It’s also true that vegetarian poops smell less. Other than that, anything goes.
Maybe the most important myth, both gastroenterologists say, is the colon-cleanse idea. “Your colon is meant to have stool in it at all times,” Staller says, and cleaning it out can get rid of healthy bacteria.
Other myths, according to Prevention:
There’s a perfect form and shape for a stool;
Pooping takes a long time;
Healthy poop doesn’t splash.
On the other hand, it’s true that poop shouldn’t float — more than once in a while, anyway. It’s evidence you’re not digesting fat and oil well. And watch the color — an occasional reflection of what you’ve been eating is OK, but white, clay-colored or (Staller swears it exists) silver poop mean serious trouble.
The idea that white food is good for diarrhea is partly true — rice and toast help — but milk and cheese are a bad idea. Really, the most important thing you can do in a case of diarrhea is stay hydrated: A sip of water mixed with 6 teaspoons of sugar and a half-teaspoon of salt throughout the day.
There's Gold In Them Thar Turds
It’s not the usual place you would go to sift for gold. It’s not a place you would really want to sift for anything, but it turns out that there is a goldmine in Britain’s sewers.
Analysis by Thames Water has found that the level of precious metals, in particular gold, in our sewerage systems compares favourably to those in working mines — with an estimated £13 million worth being flushed away every year. And now they want to get it out.
Hazel Prichard, a geologist from Cardiff University, had been looking at precious metals in urban waste. As part of this, working with Thames Water, she investigated the incinerators they used to burn off sewage sludge. “We were stunned,” she said. “They were all consistently high in gold.”
This, perhaps, should not have been so surprising. Every time we wash our hands, we rub off bits of wedding ring and bracelet down the sink. When we brush our teeth, microscopic bits of gold teeth come off with plaque. Cars deposit tiny quantities of platinum from catalytic converters in the drains.
The result is that sewage treatment works are awash with precious metals. While the absolute amounts may seem minuscule, they still clear the bar for an economically viable mine. “It’s one to three parts per million, which is huge,” Dr Prichard said. “Goldmines are economical at one to three parts per million.” Unlike goldmines, most of the work is also already done. “The advantage is, it doesn’t need to be mined . . . [or] crushed. The two big costs in getting gold out of rocks is mining and crushing them.”
If she can perfect a method for getting gold out of incinerated sewage, she thinks the market could be huge and consumers would get past the yuck factor. “It’s environmentally friendly,” she said. “It’s gold, that’s what matters.”