Word: waterous
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...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...
...said, one of the 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...
...Using so much water per flush unnecessarily increases the volume of our waste and the cost of its transportation and treatment, ecologists say. If you don't put waste in water in the first place, then you don't have to spend money to remove it at the back end. The process also leaves a huge carbon footprint, says Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters. In the UK, she says, "the sewage system uses as much energy as what the largest coal fire station in the [country] produces" - about...
...Indiana Governor: The Future of the Party Mitch Daniels was a somewhat tragic figure as President Bush's budget director, a policy-wonk, small-government conservative who found himself carrying water for a politics-driven, big-government budget buster. His aides almost had to strap him down to get him to sign a White House-directed letter supporting the corporate-welfare farm bill of 2002. But as Indiana's governor, he's gotten to do things his own way, privatizing roads, expanding health coverage, even supporting tax increases to get his state's fiscal house in order. His tough-love...