The Big Necessity (41 page)

95 percent of Britons
“Should We Splash Out to Spend a Penny?” ENCAMS (Environmental Campaigns) news release, July 19, 2006.

Forced to go on strike
Monestier,
Histoire et Bizarreries
, p. 26.

The writing on the shithouse walls
William Rivers Pitt, “The Writing on the Latrine Walls,”
TruthOut.org
, August 9, 2004, accessed at
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/50/5656
.

Frighten the horses
“I am a liberal and I believe in freedom and responsibility. In a free country, consenting adults should be able to do as they please in private, so long as they do not frighten horses. However, I should put sex in public toilets into the category of frightening the horses—or at any rate, the children.” Hansard HL (House of Lords) Vol. 648, Col. 584, May 19, 2003.

Anti-pipi wall
The wall is gently angled so that the jet of urine sprays back onto the urinator. “It is a case of the hoser being hosed,” according to Emile Vanderpooten, the municipal architect who devised it. Henry Samuel, “Paris Mayor Moves to Stop Public Urinating,”
Daily Telegraph
, October 29, 2007.

The volumes of animal excreta
The Mairie de Paris estimates that the city's 20,000 dogs produce 16 tons of “canine pollution” daily, which cost 11 million euros a year to clean up, and which cause 650 accidents a year. Mairie de Paris, “Bien vivre avec les animaux à Paris,” via
www.paris.fr
.

Three million visitors
“Beijing Airport to Launch Emergency Alert Mechanism for Olympics,”
Xinhua
, June 25, 2005.

Five minutes' walking distance
Ibid.

Chiang Kai-Shek's 96 specific rules
Andrew Morris, “‘Fight for Fertiliser!' Excrement, Public Health and Mobilization in New China,”
Journal of Unconventional History
6/3 (Spring 1995): 53.

Show mercy to the slender grass
“Beijing Getting Rid of Badly Translate [
sic
] Signs,”
China Daily
, February 27, 2007.

Guo Zhangqi the fly-catcher
“Two Farmers' Desire to Wipe Out Flies in Beijing,”
Xinhua
, June 6, 2003.

The bladder leash
Help the Aged, “Nowhere to Go: Public Toilet Provision in the UK” (London: Help the Aged, 2007), p. 5.

A national toilet map
The website of Australia's National Public Toilet map allows visitors to check location and opening times of toilets. New South Wales has the most toilets with 4,446; Northern Territory only 198. See
http://www.toiletmap.gov.au
.

Satlav
Westminster Council's Satlav service covers 8.5 square miles of central London. Users send a text message to 80097—at 25p per request—and receive in return a list of the nearest facilities and opening hours. James Meikle, “Satlav to End Problem of Users Being Caught Short,”
Guardian
, November 30, 2007.

Potty parity
During a television interview on CNN's
Crosstalk
in 2002, John Banzhaf mentioned the use of funnels for women to urinate through (easily bought these days in Swedish pharmacies). Co-anchor Robert Novak responded to this information by saying, “This show is becoming X-rated.” CNN
Crossfire
, August 9, 2002; see
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0208/09/cf.00.html
.

90 seconds to urinate
Alexander Kira calculates the mean occupancy of men at a urinal to be 45 seconds. The Malaysian Standard prefers 35 seconds. Malaysian Standard Public Toilets MS 2015, Part 1, 2006, p. 31. See also Clara Greed,
Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets
(Oxford: Architectural Press, 2003), p. 8.

Four urinals, gilt mirrors
Sarah A. Moore, “Facility Hostility? Sex Discrimination and Women's Restrooms in the Workplace,”
Georgia Law Review
36 (2002): 599.

A keypad code for access
Margaret Talev, “‘Potty Parity' Surfaces in House of Representatives,”
The Columbian
, December 24, 2006.

More sharing than many people feel comfortable with
Kira,
The Bathroom
, pp. 201–2.

Stickers in the bowl
See
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2006/09/bowl _light_lets.html
.

Stand-peeing
Kate Connolly, “German Men Told They Can No Longer Stand and Deliver,”
Daily Telegraph
, August 17, 2004.

Standing Urinators
Klaus Schwerma,
Stehnpinkeln: Die letze Bastion der Männlichkeit?
(Bielefeld: Kleine Verlag, 2000).

Herodotus reported
“Women urinate standing up, while men do so squatting. They relieve themselves indoors, while they eat outside on the streets. The reason for this, they say, is that things that are embarrassing but unavoidable should be done in private, while things which are not embarrassing should be done in the open.” Herodotus,
The Histories
, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 109. (In my 1996 Wordsworth Classics edition, though supposedly unabridged, all references to urination in this section had been removed.) 145
She-Pee female urinals
Glastonbury Bog Blog, WaterAid, June 27–29, 2007;
http://www.wateraid.org/uk/get_involved/events/festival_events/glastonbury/5591.asp
.

Twenty carloads of people
Patrick Barkham, “Bog Standards,”
Guardian
, September 24, 2001.

Foot tapping
Associated Press, “Craig Resigns Over Airport Sex Sting,” September 2, 2007; and Christopher Hitchens, “So Many Men's Rooms, So Little Time,”
Slate
, September 3, 2007.

It would be a good idea
Mohandas K. Gandhi (attributed),
Chambers Dictionary of Quotations
(Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers, 2005), p. 345.

7. THE BATTLE OF BIOSOLIDS

Bottles of cleaned sewer effluent
Kevin R. Cowan, who runs the North Davis sewer district, hands out the sewer water bottles to visitors. They have also been handed out at meetings, where the response was “tepid.” The bottles actually contain drinking water. Lynn Arave, “Sewer Water in a Bottle—Yum!”
Deseret Morning News
, October 14, 2007.

A great rough sort of business
Throughout the late nineteenth century, plenty of sewage farming systems were proposed to the Metropolitan Board of London. In fact, wrote the anonymous author of one report, “Had the application of sewage to agricultural purposes been as easy and as profitable as some loud-talking and fluently-writing people pretend, it would long since have formed the foundation of more than one joint-stock company.”
The Agricultural Value of the Sewage of London Examined in Reference to the Principle Systems Admitted to the Metropolitan Board of Works
(London: Edward Stanford & Co., 1865), pp. 17–18, 38.

Stench
On July 11, 2007, a Mogden resident called Fullalove sent the following complaint to Thames Water: “FOUL YUK STINK STENCH I CANNOT BREATHE IT IS YOUR FAULT.” Two weeks later, his neighbor Jonathan Oatway wrote despairingly that Mogden was “absolutely reeking again after the rain. It was stomach turning. We had to close all the windows but the smell lingered right throughout the house. I was moved to apologize to a guest we had visiting at the time. All very embarrassing considering the raw sewage nature of the odor. It's a joke living here, why should we live in fear of the stench?” Mogden Residents Action Group,
http://www.mogden.org.uk
. Whitley treatment works, meanwhile, inspired the Whitley Whiff. They have now been replaced by the entirely covered—and odor-free—Reading Wastewater Treatment works, which cost £80 million to build.

Synagro
Biosolids are lucrative enough for Synagro to have been bought in 2007 by the powerful private equity group Carlyle for $772 million. Justin Baer, “Carlyle Raises Dollars 1bn for Public Works,”
Financial Times
, November 7, 2007.

Bubbling with sub-surface gases
The fires burned with such intensity, two railway bridges spanning the river were nearly destroyed. The mayor of Cleveland, which the Cuyahoga runs through, said it was “a terrible
reflection on our city.” “The Cities: The Price of Optimism,”
Time
, August 1, 1969.

7 million dry tons of sludge
John Heilprin and Kevin S. Vineys, Associated Press, “Sewage-Based Fertilizer Safety Doubted,” March 6, 2008.

The worth of this lost wealth
Stephen Halliday,
The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Capital
(Stroud, U.K.: Sutton Publishing, 1999, 2007), p. 117.

No better use for the excretion
Karl Marx,
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy
, vol. 3 (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1909), p. 120.

Each farmer will turn on the tap
John Joseph Mechi,
How to Farm Profitably: The Sayings and Doings of Mr. Alderman Mechi
(London: Routledge, 1860), p. 352.

Vegetables highly sought-after
Gennevilliers sewage farm received 800 liters of Parisian sewage per second. Once irrigated, its previously barren soil became capable of producing 40,000 heads of cabbage, 60,000 artichokes, or 200,000 pounds of sugar beets per hectare. One Parisian perfumer raised peppermint. Donald Reid,
Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 62–63.

The sewage farm at Pasadena
“By the end of the century sewage farms were operating in 20 locations including Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. Pasadena's sewage farm was renowned. The three hundred acre farm supported a hundred pigs, an extensive tract of English walnuts, and an alfalfa crop largely dedicated to the municipality's working horses.” Jamie Benidickson,
The Culture of Flushing, A Social and Legal History of Sewage
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), p. 126.

100,000 chemicals in U.S. industry
Statement of Bruce Alberts, president, National Academy of Sciences, to U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, May 14, 2002,
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ocga/testimony/Persistant_Organic_Pollutants.asp
.

1,000 new chemicals added every year
Jonathan M. Harris,
A Survey of Sustainable Development
(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001), p. 290.

Selling its sludge as fertilizer
Milorganite was named by McIver and Son of Charleston, South Carolina, who entered a competition to name the new fertilizer in
National Fertilizer Magazine
in 1925. Milorganite stands for Milwaukee Organic Nitrogen. Its history is told at
http://www.milorganite.com
.

Toxic Sludge
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton,
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry
(Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1995).

Orange County
Four U.S. states have county-level grand juries. California's grand juries sit for a year and are mandated to issue investigative reports, usually into government services and institutions. In 2004, Orange County also issued reports on speaking English in Santa Ana, prisons, and whether improvements were needed in the county's animal shelters. Orange County Grand Jury, “Does Anyone Want Orange County Sanitation District's 230,000 Tons of Biosolids?” 2003–2004, at
http://www.ocgrandjury.org/reports.asp#2004-2005
.

Musty or earthy
Ibid., pp. 8–9.

Twenty-five groups of pathogens
“Researchers Link Increased Risk of Illness to Sewage Sludge Used as Fertilizer,” University of Georgia news release, July 30, 2002.

An appropriate choice for communities
U.S. EPA, “Standards for the Use or Disposal of Sewage Sludge; Final Agency Response to the National Research Council Report on Biosolids Applied to Land and the Results of EPA's Review of Existing Sewage Sludge Regulations,”
Federal Register
68/250 (December 31, 2003): 75536.

38 months
National Research Council, “Biosolids Applied to Land: Advancing Standards and Practices” (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2002 [prepublication copy]), p. 199.

Unmonitorable, unregulatable and irremediable
Abby A. Rockefeller, “Sewers, Sewage Treatment, Sludge: Damage without End,”
New Solutions
12/4 (2002): 342.

EPA regional staff
U.S. EPA Office of Inspector General, “Land Application of Biosolids,” 2002-S-000004, March 28, 2002, p. 6.

Asthma, flu-like symptoms
Ellen Z. Harrison and Summer Rayne Oakes, “Investigation of Alleged Health Incidents Associated with Land Application of Sewage Sludges,”
New Solutions
12/4 (2002): 387. An updated tally of health complaints is kept by the Cornell Institute for Waste Management at
http://cwmi.css.cornell.edu/Sludge/incidents.htm
.

Chemical irritants in sludge
David. L. Lewis and David K. Gattie, “A High-Level Disinfection Standard for Land-Applied Sewage Sludges (Biosolids),”
Environmental Health Perspectives
112 (2004): 127.

Adverse human health effects
National Research Council, “Biosolids Applied to Land,” p. 3.

Big tomatoes
Tom Gibb, “A Terrible Waste Gets Long Look,”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, June 11, 2000.

Shayne Conner
Laura Orlando, “Sustainable Sanitation: A Global Health Challenge,”
Dollars & Sense
(May–June 2001).

Sludge was behind it
CBS News, “Sewage Fertilizer Under Fire,”
October 29, 2003,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/10/29/evening news/main580816.shtml
.

The company has yet to answer
In response to questions about why the case had been settled, Synagro Public Relations Director Lorrie Loder replied, “I do not have that information available to me. I am generally aware that cases are frequently settled as a matter of expediency.” Personal communication with Lorrie Loder, Synagro, April 2008.