As I get older, I become more aware of my bodily functions, some of which don’t work the same way they did twenty years ago. I seem to spend more time “spending a penny’ than I used to and have become aware of the significant amount of water I use to flush away my more frequent urination. For maybe six or eight ounces of pee, I use a gallon or more of potable water to get rid of it. Hmm, that seems a little wasteful.

I’ve considered the option of just going outside and taking a leak in a flower bed or along the fence, but I have been discouraged by the inquisitiveness of our dog and cats, the proximity of neighbors, the openness of our yard — along with my wife’s limited sense of humor about such things. Not flushing might work if I lived alone, but my co-occupant and visitors would probably frown on that practice. I’ve considered installing a urinal that flushed with less water, but space is a limitation in all of our bathrooms.

As a sanitary engineer, I have seen all kinds of bathroom systems. In sparsely populated areas, out houses and pit toilets work quite well, but are less safe if the water table is high, allowing nearby wells to be contaminated. There are also the usual problems with odors, pests, climate, and rambunctious teenagers.

In the Alaska pipeline construction camps, some of the privies used an outhouse-style seat with half an oil drum slid beneath the opening. Periodically, a worker would come and open an outdoor hatch, slide the drum out and replace it with a new one. The used drum was taken off, filled with gasoline and burned out to remove all the waste before reusing it. The downside of this practice — in the wintertime — was that the waste worker could not tell when the seat was occupied, and the experience of a sudden blast of arctic air to your nether region could be memorable and chilling.

While I was in the Middle East, I observed that most of the local bathrooms had a slope to a hole in the floor with a small hose attached to the nearby wall. Squatting without a toilet was the normal practice for the locals, so that process worked quite well for them. With my bad knee, I didn’t feel confident trying it out, so opted for the ‘civilized’ toilet.

Jim Robbins reports, “There is no reason to only use water once,” said Peter Fiske, the executive director of the National Alliance for Water Innovation, a division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley. Just as natural systems use and reuse water repeatedly in a cycle driven by the sun, he said, “we now have technologies to enable us to process and reuse water over and over, at the scale of a city, a campus, and even an individual home.”

“While centralized water reuse for nonpotable purposes has been around for decades, a trend called the “extreme decentralization of water and wastewater” — also known as “distributed water systems,” or “on-site” or “premise” recycling — is now emerging as a leading strategy in the effort to make water use more sustainable.”

“The concept is to equip new commercial and residential buildings as well as districts, such as neighborhoods and universities, with on-site recycling plants that will make water for nonpotable use cheaper than buying potable water from a centralized source. By driving down demand for potable water, which is costly to filter, treat, and distribute, the units will help manage water more efficiently … Recycling graywater alone can save substantial amounts of water. Using it to flush toilets and wash clothes reduces demand for new water by about 40 percent.”

“But the new reuse paradigm fundamentally rethinks water systems, localizing them in much the same way that households and districts with rooftop and community solar have transformed energy systems away from centralized power plants.”

Climate change, drought, shrinking lakes, and dry forest fires all remind us that water is a special thing for our planet. Our bodies consist of about 60% water, so we should take care of our waters just as diligently as we take care of our bodies.

Additional information:

Jim Robbins, Beyond the Yuck Factor: Cities Turn to ‘Extreme’ Water Recycling, June 6, 2023, Yale Environment 360