Recently
Alternatives to Gas
Gas prices have many of us looking at investing in alternative fueled vehicles. Before you buy your next car, take a look at greener vehicles soon available in our country.
Gas-electric hybrids were first introduced by Honda in 1999 with the Insight,…Read more.
Sustainable School Budgets
We are all concerned about our schools and our rising school taxes. Most districts are facing a decline in state funding of 10 percent or more, which can be $3.6 million in real dollars. That's a lot of money, and we all wonder where it will come …Read more.
Mother's Day Alternatives
All the flowers in corporate chains and box stores are imported. The cheap abundance of imported flowers not only has an impact on Mom-and-Pop-owned florists and supermarkets, but also makes it very hard for American growers to compete. One …Read more.
“Ten Percent Challenge”
I recently received a notice from my local utility company comparing my energy usage to my neighbors. According to this Home Energy Report, I used 61 percent less energy than 99 of my neighbors and received a double smiley face on my report. You …Read more.
more articles
|
Toilet TrainingSince Thomas Crapper invented the water closet (yes, that's where the word came from), many experts have come to view our sanitation system as the worst idea of all time. We use 3.5 gallons (per flush) of our best drinking water to dilute a few ounces of "excellent fertilizer and soil conditioner" to create an expensive, wasteful disposal problem. The World Health Organization recently declared that waterborne sanitation is obsolete, and only waterless disposal of waste will allow enough water for drinking, cooking and washing in the world's largest cities. Waterless and low flow toilets could save the average household as much as $50 to $100 a year on water, adding up to $11.3 million every day nationally. These are not the same low-flow toilets that gained a well-deserved bad reputation ten years ago. Technology has improved even the lowly Crapper so that most new toilets use only about 1.6 gallons per flush (gpf). Sweden has popularized a dual bowl toilet with separate compartments and separate ways of treating human waste. This system uses no water and results in a high quality fertilizer and composted human manure as byproducts. The separating toilets cost comparably to American toilets but may take a while to catch on. Dual flush toilets are becoming more popular here in the states, and offer users a choice of .8 gpf or 1.6gpf depending on the size of the job. Composting toilets are completely waterless and can be self contained or attached to a whole building system. If you have many bathrooms, a whole building system would be the most economical. It connects all the dry toilets to a single large compost tank, usually in the basement. There is no sewer hookup, so the plumbing ends in the compost tank. A self-contained composting toilet is essentially a compost drum enclosed inside a toilet with a fold-out handle and tray.
Incinerating toilets are similar to composting toilets in that they are waterless. But they use electricity to incinerate human waste to a clean ash, eliminating both pathogens (good) and soil nutrients (bad). Many of these alternatives are costly and require a bit of plumbing know-how to install. If you want to reduce your water use today: —Try putting a brick in your toilet tank to save up to 5 gallons of water per day. —Install a $5 Frugal Flush Flapper valve in your existing toilet and conserve half your water with each flush. —Try a $1 Toilet Fill Cycle Diverter to save about 1/2 gallon per flush. —Pee on the trees if you live in a secluded area where no one will know. —Flush less often using the "yellow-mellow" rule. —Check your toilet for leaks, which could waste more than 100 gallons of water per day. Add a few drops of food coloring to the tank and see if any colored water leaks into the bowl after a few minutes.
Shawn Dell Joyce is an award-winning columnist and founder of the Wallkill River School in Orange County, N.Y. You can contact her at Shawn@ShawnDellJoyce.com. To find out more about Shawn Dell Joyce and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM
|
||||||||||||||||||





























