15.10 Making Connections

RETHINKING TOILETS

Background: In the 1990s, the Arizona State Museum created a major new exhibit featuring the life of the Tarahumara people, who live in the rugged Sierra Madre Occidental mountains in Mexico, in and around the gigantic Barranca del Cobre (Copper Canyon). The museum staff invited a number of the people from this remote area, especially those who had donated their rugs, pottery, carvings, and other artifacts, to come to Tucson to attend the opening. On arriving in Tucson, they declined to stay in the high-rise hotel where museum guests usually stayed. Instead they opted to stay with someone they knew, sleeping in the backyard so they could see familiar stars. When the uses of a bathroom were explained, the group was horrified. Since they lived in the high mountains with only a few streams, water was their most precious resource. The idea of putting human waste into a porcelain bowl of clean, pure water was unthinkable.

Case: People in many areas of North America are reaching this same conclusion, that clean water should not be used for human waste, or at least that its use should be minimized. Write a position paper for a local magazine, newspaper, or online newsblog encouraging your community to vote for or against the local proposition to reduce the use of clean water for toilets. Include the following in your paper:

1. How much water is used in a standard (pre-1994) toilet? Multiply that amount times 100 000 people (or use your local population number) times an average of three flushes per person per day times 365 days to get an estimate of the amount of water that, literally, goes down the toilet every year in your community.
2. At least three ways to reduce the amount of water used for toilets, including a redesigned toilet (with or without water).
3. Examples of ways other communities are addressing this problem.