Word: toileting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...flush or not to flush. That was the question that designers and ecologists were asking each other this week as hundreds of people - who spend a lot of time thinking about these things - convened for the annual World Toilet Summit and Expo in Macau...
...World Toilet Summit and Expo is like the Star Trek Convention of the waste management and sanitation world. Toilets on show run the gamut from a cardboard box complete with a hole, plastic bag and pouch of waterless magic pathogen-busting dust ($50), to a high-tech 'uber-toilet,' featuring an in-seat warmer/cooler, male and female water jets, an in-bowl light (why, oh why?) and a USB port so you can connect your mp3 player for your soothing tune of choice...
...figuring out how to wean the world off the flush handle took center stage. Though the common flush toilet has remained largely the same since it's invention in 1596, the world it inhabits has changed drastically. City populations have mushroomed, sewers have become overburdened and water has become scarcer. Now, the flushing loo - that human innovation that lifted the industrialized world out of its own dirt, cholera and dysentery - is quickly becoming one of the more egregious instruments of waste in this time of acutely finite resources. "The world can't sustain this toilet," says Jack Sim, the founder...
...Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, are disappointingly familiar (denunciations of the destruction of old Beijing, lamentations over the supposedly materialistic nature of Chinese college students), but these are worth thumbing through for the sharp comparisons Aiyar makes between China and her own country. Interviews with Beijing's toilet cleaners prompt her to ponder their Indian counterparts. The former harbor entrepreneurial dreams and say they prefer toilets to farmwork; the latter endure a lifelong stigma as "untouchables." In China, Aiyar observes, the word servant "described a job that someone did rather than defining the essence of who they were...
...mummy. The free toilet paper in your House’s Super’s office was made for this. And wiping asses...