Why the Toilet Needs an Upgrade | WIRED

Key Takeaways

this is a toilet this is also a toilet so this and this is the crumbling infrastructure underneath in the u.s and other places the wastewater infrastructure is aging and it's not very well suited for dealing with a lot of the challenges the future this is chelsea wald she spent over eight years researching the toilet and discovered it needs a big upgrade [Music] why hasn't the toilet really changed one of the reasons is technological lock-in our predecessor spent lots of money putting these pipes in the ground and then we're also kind of psychologically locked into it it's hard for us to imagine something different technologists are redesigning the toilet to do more than what we've asked of it before previous societies um knew that pee and poo were valuable resources in terms of the nutrients in them the current sewage system makes it difficult to recover that but it would be a lot easier if we could do it at the toilet level rather than waiting for all the mixing to happen and then trying to get it all out at the end one thing that i've seen here in the netherlands are piloting of vacuum toilets these use very little water and they suck out the waste and keep it separate from other household wastewater the gray water coming out of the house and that makes it possible to make better use of that waste another innovation that i've seen that's promising is urine diversion toilets so toilets that actually separate pee and poo these have been very hard to develop to design because they are awkward to use there's a new design called the urine trap that does this separation a little more seamlessly with less trouble to the user so the high-tech toilet of the future might be a toilet that has medical capabilities i talked to one innovator who has made a toilet that actually images your poop is and from that can determine some things about your health and especially over time and to alert you if there might be a problem the first big comprehensive sewer system for removing human waste from a city was in london in the 19th century some of those original sewers around the world from the 19th early 20th century are still in the ground and still operating one big problem from some of those old sewers it's they were combined sewers so they combined storm water with all this household water when there's a storm even if it rains a little bit in some places the sewers overflow there's a couple of ways that cities are dealing with this it's a very very difficult problem some are digging big tunnels it's very expensive massive storage underground some are building green infrastructure above ground to absorb a lot of that storm water so it doesn't even go into the store and then some cities are making their sewers smarter south bend indiana have a combined sewer and they've started putting these you know movable devices remote devices into their sewers and they've been able to reduce the number of overflows a lot without actually having to dig any extra tunnels while some cities are making sewers smarter other cities are reimagining the sewer as an energy source in vancouver a sustainable energy system was used to heat the city's olympic village you can also start to harvest stuff from sewers kind of works like the reverse of a refrigerator uses a fluid to to capture the heat and then that heat can then be transferred into a distribution system to run through the building just like any other heating system from the perspective of someone in the building they would never know that the source of the heat was sewage many cities already have a big mix of sanitation technologies that diversity can actually make cities more resilient in a way so if you can say as a city grows instead of expanding the sewer system it might make sense instead to introduce building scale systems or district scale systems or if there are areas where it really makes sense to have on-site sanitation because it's kind of more rural you could introduce systems there that make sense you know ecologically for that area wastewater treatment plants take everything we dump down the drain and toilet filters it and uses microorganisms to clean the water one of the problems that wastewater treatment plants face is the residual sludge that comes out of this process but there's people who are now looking for new ways to make use of this sludge one is to take that sludge and turn it into a kind of bio crude that can then be used as a transportation fuel in a lot of places people have been inadvertently drinking recycled reused waste water for a long time so these programs are called indirect potable reuse programs orange county was the pioneer of this program they actually clean their water to drinking water standards using advanced technology and then they inject it into an aquifer and then on the other hand you have direct potable reuse and that would mean taking the cleaned up effluent and putting it back into the pipeline directly as drinking water there is a fear of the yuck factor or the ick factor which has held back these programs in the past there is a big trend for pilot projects for direct potable reuse all over the world but especially in the united states even in the last year or two it's just going to be one of the most reliable sources of water that's available and you'd rather have direct potable reuse water than no water coming from your tap that's for sure so when writing this book i came across just a wide variety of people working on all different aspects of the toilet from the design of public toilets to the design of the toilet bowl to improving sewer systems to improving the pit latrines to improving wastewater treatment to using the products of wastewater treatment the toilet is really one of the most fundamental technologies that underpin human society and if you want to think about it poetically we are connected to each other as humans and to the planet through the toilet so it is so important that our toilets are good that they're healthy that they're sustainable and that everybody has access to one [Music]