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Green Bathroom Renovation: Getting Techie
Why the Design Matters
The definitive guide to bathroom design is Alexander Kira's The Bathroom, published in 1966 and updated in 1975. Kira examined the physical aspects of peeing and pooping, and how bad we are at doing it and getting clean afterwards. As Chip Rowe puts it in his review:
"He discusses why North Americans have rejected the European bidet as a way to clean the anus after defecation, and says that rejection wouldn't have been such a big deal if only we were better at wiping ourselves..."
Gray-water is the wastewater that comes from processes like bathing and showering. It isn't heavily polluted, but it's no longer safe for drinking or for uses such as crop irrigation. Because it is less polluted than "blackwater" (more on that below), it can be more easily collected and recycled in the home; a common method involves recycling greywater into the tank of your toilet, where, after the toilet is used, it becomes blackwater.
Black-water is the wastewater that comes from the toilet (after you use it) or from highly concentrated chemicals. In most cases, blackwater cannot be treated and reused in the home without a dedicated blackwater recycling system, so it’s often piped off to a treatment plant and you flush it down the toilet. Most homes mix the two, making quick recovery for reuse very difficult; having separate grey and blackwater systems is a relatively easy way to save hundreds of gallons of water.
Composting Toilets
Most of the money spent in developing suburbs is the underground infrastructure, the veins and arteries carrying water and waste. Yet most of our waste water need not go to the sewer, gray water from showers and sinks could be used in gardens for irrigation. The only water that is a problem is that from the toilet- so why don't we try and get rid of it? Perhaps we should have composting toilets in our houses. More on composting toilets for houses:
Thinking about Crap: Should Houses Have Composting Toilets?
Composting toilets: Ready for Prime Time?
Waste Not, Want Not: The Future of Toilets
A Brief History of Bathroom Design
The British, not being big bathers, gave us one version of bathroom design. When upper class Brits started installing indoor plumbing in the closets of their manor houses, they became water closets, or WCs. Since all the plumbing came indoors at the same time, it was often combined in one room, although the separate closet for the toilet was very common.
The Japanese, on the other hand, were very big bathers, and have been taking it seriously for a thousand years. They wouldn't think of putting a dirty toilet in a room where you celebrate cleanliness. The Japanese are right; toilets are dirty. One study by Charles Gerba showed that flushing a toilet sends airborne fecal coliform bacteria quite a distance, a lot farther than those toothbrushes in a glass by the sink. Yet in North America we squeeze them right between the sink and the tub, to maximize the dispersal of germs.
Here in the U.S., we made our bathrooms small; the five-by-eight bathroom with the three fixtures lined up in a row rules. Fancy finishes are costly; bathrooms are one of the most expensive rooms in the house to build, averaging about $10,000, and, in America, price per square foot rules. Prior to World War II, building codes demanded windows; that is why so many old apartment buildings have airshafts down the middle. Then the mechanical engineers and builders convinced everyone of the wonders of mechanical ventilation, which wasn't bad at first when it was designed as a central exhaust system that always ran, but which soon evolved into individual, cheap, noisy exhaust fans pushing air thirty feet to the exterior wall.
In the postwar boom, America became crazed with cleanliness, and our bathrooms came to resemble hospital operating rooms with their floor to ceiling tile and glass. Commercials sold us bowl cleaners, tile cleaners, and the like to keep everything clean, and air fresheners to keep it smelling fresh. Even as America boomed with new construction, into warmer climates and bigger houses, the bathrooms continued to be small, dark, superficially sterile, toxic closets that suck up water and energy in huge quantities, and whisk away water and useful resources through a pipe, leaving someone else to clean our mess.
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