Word: toileting
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...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...
...millions who tends to 'flush and forget' on a regular basis, chances are you're dumping up to 22 liters of drinkable water every day, one three- to six-liter flush at a time. But the problem doesn't stop there. What follows - the 'forget' part of the toilet experience - is the long and costly process of sanitizing the water that was clean before you answered nature's call. In the developed world, the flush toilet is our only direct link to the enormous - and exorbitant - engineering feat that is the modern urban sanitation system: the sewers, filtration plants, water...
...needs to be to stop mixing liquids and solids, says the WTO's Sim. "The human body is designed to separate solids from liquid waste," and we should follow suit, he says. By separating fecal matter from urine at the source in what's called a "urine diversion toilet," a wider ecological system of waste disposal becomes possible. Solids can be composted for fertilizer and harvested for methane gas. Urine can be used to produce phosphorous and nitrogen and clean, drinkable water. (The question is, will people bring themselves to drink it?) (For travel tips and stories visit time.com/travel.)...
...Ecological sanitation, as this call to arms is known in toilet circles, is already up and running in many spots around the world. In rural China, 15.4 million homes convert methane into power from what normally went down the pit behind the house. Household waste is stored in a state-subsidized "digester," a kind of metal stomach that breaks down the matter and releases methane gas which is trapped for reuse. In the French city of Lille, a small fleet of ten buses are also using methane, gleaned from the city's poop. And in some Indian villages, simple latrines...