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Why the modern bathroom is so wasteful
Modern bathrooms are complex and impractical. They seem to be designed with little regard for how the human body actually works, using drinking water to flush away, draining valuable sources of nutrients and phosphorus into nowhere.
Let’s take a look at how bathrooms and sewers came about. And why did that happen?
For centuries, people in major cities took water for cooking and washing from rivers or wells, limiting their consumption largely to what they could carry. Waste was dumped in brick cesspools that were cleaned and sold as fertilizer or discarded in rivers. Liquid waste was thrown into gutters in the middle of the road.
In 1854, at the height of a cholera epidemic in London, Dr. Jon Snow discovered that death centered around one of these water pumps. When he removed the pen from the pump, the cholera epidemic stopped immediately. He made the first test of the link between human waste and disease.
Excrement + drinking water = death
After people realized that excrement + drinking water = death, Parliament passed the Water Delivery Act, which “provided for the provision of clean and healthy water to the metropolis.” Public pumps have been replaced by water pipes directly into homes.
It was perhaps the biggest, but now underrated, convenience. Instead of carrying water, all of a sudden everything became accessible with the turn of the tap. Not surprisingly, the average amount of water used per person has risen rapidly from 3 to 30 litres and possibly as much as 100 litres per person.
The toilet was almost a trivial addition. But it has become an incredibly convenient tool for cleaning hotels. Only now there are more fecal effects than ever before. Back then, no one knew what to do with the crowded cesspools that flow into the drains and sewers originally designed to drain rainwater. It all went into the rivers. The result is more cholera and disease.
Ecologists tried to stop it; they promoted the conservation of earthen toilets that would keep human waste separate and treat it as a resource.
Engineers were divided again between those who believed in the value of human excrement in agriculture and those who did not. Believers advocated “sewage farming,” in practice watering neighboring farms with urban wastewater. The second group, who argued that “the pipeline cleans itself” (the slogan among sanitary engineers was “solving pollution is breeding”), advocated pipelines that drain wastewater into lakes, rivers and oceans.
But there was no time to discuss the matter; as the proposal was made and people rushed to install comfortable toilets. Soon every polluted stream and gutter expanded, covered, and turned into what remains today as an urban sewer system. So it was -- actually, just floating with the flow, not thinking about the consequences.
Inside our homes, architects and homeowners in the late 19th century were puzzled by how to ennoble it. People first inserted washbasins in their bedrooms, mounting sinks and pipes in closets, toilets were put in the hall or under the stairwell. But soon everyone realized that there was no point in running a plumber into the bedroom when it was much cheaper to bring it all in one place. So the bathtub idea was born.
When the microbial theory was adopted in the late 19th century, the bathroom became like a hospital room, with porcelain mounts and lined with tiles or marble. The plumbers have developed certain standards for laying and installation. Since about 1910, bathrooms have become indistinguishable from those built today.
No one seriously thought about the different functions and their needs; everyone simply accepted the position that if water comes in and water comes out, it's all pretty much the same thing and should be in the same room. No one thought that shower or bath (dirty) water was different from toilet water; it simply went down the same channel that connected to the same sewer pipe that collected rainwater from the streets and carried it to burial in a river or lake.
It is difficult to define what we actually got in a modern bathroom. The toilet is too high (our bodies were designed to squat), the sink is too low and almost useless; the shower is dangerous (people get injured every day and even die in the bathroom or shower). We fill this tiny, inadequately ventilated room with toxic chemicals ranging from nail polish to tile cleaning products. We consume millions of liters of fresh water and contaminate it with toxic chemicals, waste products, antibiotics and birth control hormones in quantities large enough to change the sex of fish.
We have confused all of our bodily functions in a plant designed by engineers based on a water and sewer system rather than human needs. The result was a toxic release of polluted water, air of questionable quality and an incredible amount of waste. This can't go on.
The motto of modern toilets could be “Saving up to 30 liters per day”, as well as the idea of compost toilets. In the bathroom, you can save more than 30 liters, as well as separate water contaminated with feces from household water that comes out of the sink and bathroom. Then use compost for fertilizer, as they did 100 years ago.
Another source of waste and inefficiency is the shower. Water works all the time, even when you soap yourself with soap or shampoo. You tend to stand in a slippery dangerous bathtub or in a tiny booth where you can't get out of the flow of water. People who care about the environment use less water, make less nozzle, jumping out of the shower as quickly as possible to spend less resources. But it's not interesting.
In Japan, you sit on a chair and eat a bucket, sponge, bucket and hand shower that you only turn on when you need it. You can sit comfortably and bathe as long as you want without fear of slipping, and then use a bucket or hand shower to rinse. It's really much more enjoyable. This shower uses 10% water compared to a normal shower. If you take a hot bath, this water is used for the whole family.
Bathrooms have never been shared before and we need to consider this fact when designing the bathroom of the future.
The Japanese sold their feces, and the rich had more because they had better diets and better fertilizer. The land was cultivated more intensively and fewer farm animals could be kept.
In a world where freshwater supplies are running out, we are making man-made fertilizers out of fossil fuels and approaching peak phosphorus production, it is idiocy and an almost criminal offense that we pay huge amounts of taxes on the use of drinking water to flush our fertilizers and phosphorus into rivers and oceans. In the near future, we must change this situation.
Source: rodovid.me
Let’s take a look at how bathrooms and sewers came about. And why did that happen?
For centuries, people in major cities took water for cooking and washing from rivers or wells, limiting their consumption largely to what they could carry. Waste was dumped in brick cesspools that were cleaned and sold as fertilizer or discarded in rivers. Liquid waste was thrown into gutters in the middle of the road.
In 1854, at the height of a cholera epidemic in London, Dr. Jon Snow discovered that death centered around one of these water pumps. When he removed the pen from the pump, the cholera epidemic stopped immediately. He made the first test of the link between human waste and disease.
Excrement + drinking water = death
After people realized that excrement + drinking water = death, Parliament passed the Water Delivery Act, which “provided for the provision of clean and healthy water to the metropolis.” Public pumps have been replaced by water pipes directly into homes.
It was perhaps the biggest, but now underrated, convenience. Instead of carrying water, all of a sudden everything became accessible with the turn of the tap. Not surprisingly, the average amount of water used per person has risen rapidly from 3 to 30 litres and possibly as much as 100 litres per person.
The toilet was almost a trivial addition. But it has become an incredibly convenient tool for cleaning hotels. Only now there are more fecal effects than ever before. Back then, no one knew what to do with the crowded cesspools that flow into the drains and sewers originally designed to drain rainwater. It all went into the rivers. The result is more cholera and disease.
Ecologists tried to stop it; they promoted the conservation of earthen toilets that would keep human waste separate and treat it as a resource.
Engineers were divided again between those who believed in the value of human excrement in agriculture and those who did not. Believers advocated “sewage farming,” in practice watering neighboring farms with urban wastewater. The second group, who argued that “the pipeline cleans itself” (the slogan among sanitary engineers was “solving pollution is breeding”), advocated pipelines that drain wastewater into lakes, rivers and oceans.
But there was no time to discuss the matter; as the proposal was made and people rushed to install comfortable toilets. Soon every polluted stream and gutter expanded, covered, and turned into what remains today as an urban sewer system. So it was -- actually, just floating with the flow, not thinking about the consequences.
Inside our homes, architects and homeowners in the late 19th century were puzzled by how to ennoble it. People first inserted washbasins in their bedrooms, mounting sinks and pipes in closets, toilets were put in the hall or under the stairwell. But soon everyone realized that there was no point in running a plumber into the bedroom when it was much cheaper to bring it all in one place. So the bathtub idea was born.
When the microbial theory was adopted in the late 19th century, the bathroom became like a hospital room, with porcelain mounts and lined with tiles or marble. The plumbers have developed certain standards for laying and installation. Since about 1910, bathrooms have become indistinguishable from those built today.
No one seriously thought about the different functions and their needs; everyone simply accepted the position that if water comes in and water comes out, it's all pretty much the same thing and should be in the same room. No one thought that shower or bath (dirty) water was different from toilet water; it simply went down the same channel that connected to the same sewer pipe that collected rainwater from the streets and carried it to burial in a river or lake.
It is difficult to define what we actually got in a modern bathroom. The toilet is too high (our bodies were designed to squat), the sink is too low and almost useless; the shower is dangerous (people get injured every day and even die in the bathroom or shower). We fill this tiny, inadequately ventilated room with toxic chemicals ranging from nail polish to tile cleaning products. We consume millions of liters of fresh water and contaminate it with toxic chemicals, waste products, antibiotics and birth control hormones in quantities large enough to change the sex of fish.
We have confused all of our bodily functions in a plant designed by engineers based on a water and sewer system rather than human needs. The result was a toxic release of polluted water, air of questionable quality and an incredible amount of waste. This can't go on.
The motto of modern toilets could be “Saving up to 30 liters per day”, as well as the idea of compost toilets. In the bathroom, you can save more than 30 liters, as well as separate water contaminated with feces from household water that comes out of the sink and bathroom. Then use compost for fertilizer, as they did 100 years ago.
Another source of waste and inefficiency is the shower. Water works all the time, even when you soap yourself with soap or shampoo. You tend to stand in a slippery dangerous bathtub or in a tiny booth where you can't get out of the flow of water. People who care about the environment use less water, make less nozzle, jumping out of the shower as quickly as possible to spend less resources. But it's not interesting.
In Japan, you sit on a chair and eat a bucket, sponge, bucket and hand shower that you only turn on when you need it. You can sit comfortably and bathe as long as you want without fear of slipping, and then use a bucket or hand shower to rinse. It's really much more enjoyable. This shower uses 10% water compared to a normal shower. If you take a hot bath, this water is used for the whole family.
Bathrooms have never been shared before and we need to consider this fact when designing the bathroom of the future.
The Japanese sold their feces, and the rich had more because they had better diets and better fertilizer. The land was cultivated more intensively and fewer farm animals could be kept.
In a world where freshwater supplies are running out, we are making man-made fertilizers out of fossil fuels and approaching peak phosphorus production, it is idiocy and an almost criminal offense that we pay huge amounts of taxes on the use of drinking water to flush our fertilizers and phosphorus into rivers and oceans. In the near future, we must change this situation.
Source: rodovid.me
Caution: snacks are addictive!
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