The Big Necessity (35 page)

 

 

_______________________

Buzz Aldrin on the moon

(NASA)

 

 

SMALL ENERGY

____________

 

 

The most expensive toilet on earth is designed never to be used on earth. At a cost of $23.4 million, the toilet designed for NASA's space shuttles may seem a ludicrous waste of money. It probably exasperates NASA critics, who see little purpose in spending money on space when there's much to be sorted out on Earth. It wouldn't impress Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak of Sulabh either, whose handbook complains that “our scientists think of going to the moon, [but a] toilet is not in their vision at all.” Such criticisms are wrong. NASA's attempts to improve the disposal of its crews' excreta in the skies could lead the way for the earth-bound to do the same.

The Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) that controls the living environment on shuttles and on the International Space Station doesn't have the luxury of disposal when discharging trash into space has long since been judged a bad idea. In the past, astronauts' conditions were considerably more primitive: when Alan Shepard set off for the first
Mercury
shuttle flight, on May 5, 1961, no provision was made for any excretion, as the flight was supposed to last fifteen minutes. But it was delayed by four hours, and Shepard was finally given permission to pee in his space suit after mission control had concluded that he wouldn't damage its precious fabrics.

At that point, says Amanda Young, curator of early space flight at the National Air and Space Museum, NASA realized “it was a very real problem.” Fecal bags were developed for the
Apollo
missions. These stuck to the astronauts' backside, were sealed with Velcro after use, then stored until landing. Urine could be dumped overboard, but a hole big enough to dump feces in space could make the spacecraft too vulnerable. “If you have a break in the skin of the craft,” says Young, “oxygen is sucked out of the astronauts. They begin to boil. They'd die in twenty seconds.” For the moon landings, all astronauts were wearing “fecal containment devices”—like padded shorts—as well as a urine collection bag attached to the suit with a valve. No one used the fecal options, but a famous photo of Buzz Aldrin is known in certain circles as “Buzz whizzing.”

At Star City, Russia's equivalent of NASA, a guide called Alexandr tells me that on space walks, cosmonauts wear diapers, yet another example of the superior practicality of Russians in space flight. (This reputation was secured for me by the story—confirmed by Young—that an American company once spent millions on developing a pen that could write upside down in space, while the Russians took pencils.) I tell Young I've heard Russian toilets in space are better and she believes it. “They build things that are simple and hard-wearing.” The Russian International Space Station toilet is also superior, according to astronaut anecdote, though the specialized training required to use toilets in space—a procedure that requires getting a grip on both the receptacle and the sucking, vacuuming devices that come with it—prevented the Americans from using it.

Asking how astronauts go to the bathroom is one of the most common questions put during NASA or space museum outreach sessions. To cope with the curiosity, for a while the agency posted a video that featured a fully-clothed volunteer showing exactly how it was done: with a mirror, sometimes. Young is often asked about it. “Interest from the public is strange. Women don't care. They think, they worked it out and that's that. Men have an almost unhealthy interest. Children are interested in the poop factor.” What everybody should actually be interested in is the drinking pee factor.

_______

 

Space scientists are faced with a particular difficulty. Water weighs a kilogram a liter. It is heavy and therefore expensive: it costs $40,000 to transport each gallon up to the International Space Station. They don't want to load a shuttle or space station with extra weight, but they need water. So the ECLSS does what anyone would do in straitened circumstances: it turns urine into drinking water. On future space station missions, and on the planned 2012 mission to Mars, astronauts will be drinking their own urine, sweat, breath, and tears because they have to. When NASA recently bought a secondhand Russian space station toilet for $19 million, it was not only because the Russians make hardier kit, but because the toilet can recycle urine. Officially, this process is called reuse or reclaiming, and it may be the future of the planet. In fact, it's already happening.

Water, water everywhere and none of it infinite. Water is a fixed commodity. At any time in history, the planet contains about 332 million cubic miles of it. Most is salty. Only 2 percent is fresh water and two-thirds of that is unavailable for human use, locked in snow, ice, and permafrost. We are using the same water that the dinosaurs drank, and this same water has to make ice creams in Pasadena and the morning frost in Paris. It is limited and it is being wasted. In 2000, twice as much water was used throughout the world as in 1960. Water consumption is currently at about 1,700 liters (449 gallons) per person per day, but that's an average, and most of it is not going down sinks and toilets, but onto fields, into irrigation channels, sprayed around greenhouses. Sixty-nine percent of our planet's daily water is used for agricultural purposes, and consumption is increasing. By 2050, half of the planet's projected 8.9 billion people will live in countries that are chronically short of water.

Usage is only part of the problem. We are wasting our water mostly by putting waste into it. One cubic meter of wastewater can pollute ten cubic meters of water. Discharging wastewater into oceans turns freshwater into the less useful salty stuff. Desalination is expensive even for the oil-rich desert states of the Gulf that are its biggest fans. (A brief
conversation from a wastewater conference with a sewage manager from Abu Dhabi: “We use sand filters for our tertiary treatment.” “Oh, I bet you have no shortage of that, do you?” “Actually the sand is the wrong size. We have to import it.”)

The reuse of wastewater effluent is now being proposed in several water-stressed areas of the world. In San Diego, the so-called Toilet to Tap proposal has been rejected by voters several times, and the same happened in Toowoomba, Australia, where rainfall has decreased 30 percent in the last thirty years. The “yes” campaign in Toowoomba was led by councillor Dianne Thorley, who told a TV interviewer that if she had her way, there would be “advanced water treatment plants bolted onto every sewage plant in Australia.” She was totally convinced that a system using advanced ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, and UV disinfection, or the best cleansing modern science can provide, would ensure adequate safety. It may—though those organic chemicals from your shower gel will probably still remain—but it can't filter out natural aversion.

Pro-reuse campaigners have two arguments to counter this. To begin with, recycled effluent is already widely used in agriculture. And it's also widely drunk, though unknowingly. Countless human settlements take their drinking water from the same source into which other countless human settlements discharge their raw or treated sewage. Londoners supposedly drink tap water that has gone through seven pairs of kidneys, probably an exaggeration but based in truth, as London takes drinking water from the Thames downstream of towns that discharge their cleaned effluent into the same river. In fact, several American municipalites already do this “indirect potable reuse.” The Upper Occoquan Sewage Authority's effluent supplies 20 percent of the inflow into the Occoquan Reservoir, which gives the residents of Fairfax County, Virginia, their drinking water. In droughts, it can supply 90 percent, and the sewage authority maintains that its highly treated effluent is cleaner than most water sources that end up in the reservoir. Toilets already go to taps.

In 2007, the French bottled water company Cristaline launched an advertising campaign that featured the slogan “I don't drink the water I use” next to a toilet, then a bottle of Cristaline, the purer, non-toilet
alternative. The French minister of the environment threatened to sue. It was impressive impertinence from a business as profligate with environmentally devastating plastic as bottled water producers are. But impertinence doesn't seem to matter when global sales of mineral water are $25 billion a year. Americans alone last year bought $2.17 billion of only one brand, though this brand—Aquafina, owned by Pepsi-Cola—now admits on its labels that its pure water comes out of an ordinary tap. Despite this revelation, sales were unaffected, leading a spokesperson at the Beverage Marketing Corporation to conclude that “the consumer just doesn't seem to care about the source.” Anyway, sometimes sewage effluent is cleaner than drinking water: a sewer worker tells me that “it's lunacy. We spend a fortune on cleaning effluent to a high standard, then we discharge it into the river, which makes it dirty again.” Other lunacies include adding orthophosphorous acid to drinking water—to counteract lead leaking in from old pipes—then having to remove phosphorus from sewage effluent.

Reuse works better when it involves camouflage. This technique is used, appropriately for a militarized country, in Israel. During a presentation at a London wastewater conference, a beautiful woman from Israel's Mekorot wastewater treatment utility, who stood out in a room full of gray suits, explained that they fed the effluent into an aquifer, withdrew it, then used it as potable water. “It is psychologically very important,” she told the rapt audience, “for people to know that the water is coming from the aquifer.”

This is a clever way of getting around fecal aversion. Not having wastewater—and not wasting water—would be better still.

 

Several hours along dusty roads in China's rural Shaanxi Province, there is a one-street village called Gan Quan Fang. It's a place of farmers and of houses hiding interior courtyards behind mighty front doors. Gan Quan Fang had been chosen by Plan, an international development agency, as a pilot village to test ecological sanitation. To see the project in place, if not in action, a Plan consultant directs me to the village headman. In one corner of the main room in his large house are stacked several bags of a type of fertilizer that has long been banned in the West
because it makes such good explosive. The headman is out, and his wife is busy making small pancakes in a blackened oven that her daughter-in-law feeds constantly with straw, so that her lungs, I bet, are the color of the oven. The daughter-in-law leaves her task to wake up their house guests, three young women—currently having their afternoon nap—who are working as “ecological volunteers” for Plan this summer during a break from their university studies in environmental science.

Two of the young women give their English names as Jessie and Cissie (it is common practice for younger Chinese to take an English name to add to their Chinese one). They are lovely and tenacious, because it's not an easy thing to convince a farmer who has always defecated in his field to install a toilet indoors. “They think it is alien,” says Jessie. “It is very strange for them to have a toilet inside the home.” It is even odder to have one that is set up on a tiled platform that involves a Ping-Pong ball. The Plan eco-san toilet is a urine-diverting twin pit. The toilet bowl is partitioned: urine goes in one container and feces in another. Drier solids are easier to compost. A Ping-Pong ball kept in the urine hole prevents odor, a cheap and locally available innovation that puts it in the development category of “appropriate technology.” Urine separation would make sense in the world of waterborne treatment, too. Though it only makes up 5 percent of the flow, urine contains 80 percent of the nitrogen and 45 percent of the phosphorus that has to be removed at treatment works. Separating it at source would cut down treatment processes and costs. A urine separation toilet also cuts water use by 80 percent.