Waste and time

The EPA found in 2007 that the United States flushes 4.8 billion gallons of water down its toilets every day. I mention that not to shame you into doing your business in a hole in the backyard from now on, but only because the other day I had cause to reflect on toilet water a bit. 

I was shopping at the local food co-op and felt the need to relieve myself. This co-op is in a pretty new facility, and it’s replete with eco-friendly bells and whistles. Solar panels, native species planted around the parking lot—that kind of thing. It also has in the bathroom stalls those fancy toilets with separate buttons for “solid waste” and “liquid waste.”

These toilets always bring out the righteously embarrassed Victorian in me. A gentleman’s excretions should be his own private business, should they not? How can we tolerate the barbarous humiliation of being asked to indicate the “solidity” or “fluidity” of our leavings? It’s almost more than a civilized man can bear. 

I suppose we should only be thankful they extend us the courtesy of euphemizing the substances as “solid waste” and “liquid waste.” Were they to label the buttons just “urine” and “feces,” the indignity might be so severe I would simply have to hold my function until such time as I could perform it in the privacy of my own home.  

I was in an unusually observant mood the other day, though, and I noticed that I didn’t actually need to describe my wastes to the toilet machine at all. Reading the fine print below the buttons, I learned that a sensor in the toilet could make the decision as to “solid waste” or “liquid waste” for me. Surprising in itself, but even more surprising is how it makes that decision. The sensor determines the proper flush volume, I read, “based on the amount of time spent in the stall.”

I had to think about that for a while. Someone working for a toilet manufacturer (Or toilet sensor manufacturer—they could be totally different industries.) had to make a decision for the cut-off time between urination and defecation. Who was that guy, and how did he do it, and what time did he decide on? What kind of statistical analysis goes into determining the average times for human waste elimination?

It must have been a hell of a job to research. Did they place stopwatches and video cameras in bathroom stalls across America, or did they bring in test subjects for a series of blind clinical trials? How careful were they to get a representative sample of the population?

It’s just that I have to imagine there’s sometimes overlap between the time it takes to pee and the time it takes to poop. If, for example, you imagine a really slow urinator—say, an old guy with a narrow urethra and a large bladder and an uncircumcised penis—and you imagine a really fast defecator—a fit young guy who gets plenty of fiber and just had a cup of coffee—you have to figure that occasionally the latter finishes before the former.

These are boundary cases, sure, but the toilet scientists must have accounted for them with some kind of statistical weight, right? Did they have heated arguments about the relevance or irrelevance of urinary outliers? Maybe after months of debate they just said, “Fuck it. Anything longer than a minute thirty-five gets the poop flush.” So there may be fast poopers out there routinely finding their creations met by a mere trickle insufficient to the task, while slow pissers find theirs met by a roaring deluge capable of sucking down a bag of rocks.

And once they decided on an upper time limit for urination, did the toilet engineers consider an upper bound for what we could reasonably assume to be healthy defecation? Surely there’s a time beyond which we would have to start worrying. If someone’s on that toilet for longer than half an hour, does the toilet sensor automatically call an ambulance? Seems like it should.

These thoughts all ran through my head as I stood there eliminating that morning’s beverages, and probably dribbling some of them on the floor in my absentmindedness. I  reached the conclusion that designing environmentally responsible toilet solutions for the public may be one of the hardest jobs in America. Those guys must really care about saving those few extra gallons of water.