Emily Johnson

4/13/2014
Ms. Lawrence
What is wasted can be recycled
The flushable toilet was invented in 1596 by a British nobleman name Sir John
Harrington. He invented a valve that could be pulled and releases water from the water
closet when flushed. This was an invention that changed the world of sanitation forever
and for the better. But is it really worth the cost of fresh water that is used in the toilets?
More than 45% of water used in a person's home is used in the bathroom, 27% of
the that comes from the toilet. Toilets have changed over the years, older toilets wasted 7
gallons of water per flush, where now high efficient toilets use only 1.6 gallons per flush.
Many people have a "flush and forget" attitude when using the toilet, but that is something
that needs to be changed. Chances are that you're dumping 22 liters of drinkable water
every day, the water entering your toilet before you use it is clean water that you are using
to wash away your waste. In the developed world, the flush toilet is our only direct link to
the enormous and exorbitant engineering feat that is the modern urban sanitation system.
The sewers, filtration plants, water treatment facilities and finally, treated water disposal
channels that send the scrubbed water into our rivers and lakes.
Using so much water per flush unnecessarily increases the volume of our waste and
the cost of its transportation and treatment, ecologists say. If you don't put waste in water
in the first place, then you don't have to spend money to remove it at the back end. The
process also leaves a huge carbon footprint, the UK says, "the sewage system uses as much
energy as what the largest coal fire station in the country produces." Which is about 28.8
million tons of carbon dioxide a year. But the fundamental shift in how we think about our
waste and by extension, dispose of it, needs to be to stop mixing liquids and solids says the
WTO's Sim. "The human body is designed to separate solids from liquid waste," and we
should follow suit, he says. By separating fecal matter from urine at the
source in what's called a "urine diversion
toilet," a wider ecological system of waste disposal becomes possible. Solids can be
composted for fertilizer and harvested for methane gas. Urine can be used to produce
phosphorous and nitrogen and clean, drinkable water.
Now our drinking water we use today comes from ground water and surface water,
such as rivers and springs. Remember earlier in my paper I expressed how toilet water is
cleaned and put back into rivers and lakes. Yes we do drink reused water, Las Vegas and
the Southwest have been one of the first to drink reused water because of droughts and
growing populations. Water can go through processes to be cleaned enough to be
drinkable. California has also started to process of mixing ground water with sewage water
to create drinking water which about 2.4 million Orange County residents use this in the
drought they are experiencing. Recycled water's been such a good deal for Orange County, the water
district is spending $140 million to expand its
capacity to purify wastewater by 30 percent. It starts in Fountain Valley where the water district
operates a 24-acre facility that takes sewage from the sanitation plant next door and
converts it into millions of gallons a day of pure H2O.

OC Water District President Shawn Dewane said the cost is 30 percent cheaper than
imported water.
Clean drinking water and proper sanitation has been key to keeping disease from
people over time. But as we waste more water when we flush we are using water that could
have been used as consumption. There are easy ways of making any toilet a low flow toilet
so you don't waste as much water but there is always something better. Why not save
water and have our waste go to good use? There are toilets that can seperate urine and
feces. Urine can be cleaned and recycled into clean drinking water but it can also but used
as great fertilizer because it has nitrogen and phosphorus in it. It would be better if urine
ended up on farms helping plants then in rivers and lakes.










http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/03/06/42632/california-drought-orange-county-taps-
sewage-water/?slide=1
http://www.deq.louisiana.gov/portal/PROGRAMS/DrinkingWaterProtectionProgram/Wh
eredoesdrinkingwatercomefrom.aspx
http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1857113,00.html
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/07/what-really-happens-after-you-
flush/2440/#slide1
http://www.conserveh2o.org/toilet-water-use
http://blog.toiletpaperworld.com/who-invented-the-toilet/