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Whythemodernbathroomisawasteful,unhealthydesign|Lifeandstyle|TheGuardian
Lloyd Alter
Tuesday 15 July 2014 09.53BST
For centuries, the people of London and other big cities got their cooking and washing
water from rivers or wells, limiting their consumption to pretty much what they could
carry. They dumped their waste into brick-lined cesspits that would be emptied by the
night soil men, who sold it as fertilizer or dumped it off Dung Pier into the Thames.
Liquid waste might be thrown into gutters in the middle of the road.
In 1854, in the middle of a cholera epidemic in London, Dr John Snow mapped where
victims died and found that the deaths seemed concentrated around one of those
pumps, at 37 Broad Street. When he had the handle removed from the pump, the
cholera epidemic stopped immediately. He had made the first verifiable connection
between human waste and disease.
After people realised that excrement plus drinking water equals death, parliament
passed the Metropolitan Water Act to make provision for securing the supply to the
metropolis of pure and wholesome water. Public pumps were replaced with pipes
delivering water directly to homes.
This was perhaps the greatest, but now undervalued, convenience. Instead of carrying
water, suddenly everyone had as much as they could use, all the time, with the turn of a
tap. Not surprisingly, according to Abby Rockefeller in Civilization and Sludge, the
average water use per person went quickly from three gallons of water per person to 30
and perhaps as much as 100 gallons per person.
The toilet was an almost trivial addition; it had been around for a while (John Harington,
a member of Elizabeth Is privy council invented a flush toilet, but there is no evidence
that she ever tried it) but was pretty useless without a water supply. But it became
incredibly convenient to just to wash the poop away. Except now there was more faecal
effluence than anyone knew what to do with, overflowing the cesspits and flowing into
the gutters and sewers originally designed for rainwater that all led to the Thames. The
result was even more cholera and disease.
The environmentalists of the day tried to stop this; they promoted earth toilets that
would keep human waste separate, that would treat it as a resource. Rockefeller writes:
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The engineers were divided again between those who believed in the value of human
excreta to agriculture and those who did not. The believers argued in favour of 'sewage
farming', the practice of irrigating neighbouring farms with municipal sewage. The
second group, arguing that 'running water purifies itself' (the more current slogan
among sanitary engineers: 'the solution to pollution is dilution'), argued for piping
sewage into lakes, rivers, and oceans.
But they never really had a chance to debate the issue; it was a done deal as people
rushed to install convenient flush toilets. Soon every contaminated stream and gutter
was being enlarged and covered over and turned into what remains todays urban sewer
system. In the Guardian, Blake Morrison described it as being on a par, aesthetically,
with the canal bridges and railway viaducts of the Victorian era". But it was really just
going with the flow instead of thinking about the consequences.
Inside our houses, the architects and homeowners of the late 19th century were as
confused as the engineers about what to do. People had washstands in their bedrooms,
so at first they just stuck sinks and taps into them, and put the toilet into whatever closet
in the hall or space under the stairs that they could find, hence the water closet. They
quickly realised that it didnt make a lot of sense to run plumbing to every bedroom
when it was cheaper to bring it all to one place, and the idea of the bathroom was born.
Since the early adopters, then as now, were the rich with a few rooms to spare, they were
often lavish, with all the fixtures encased in wood like the commodes they replaced.
As germ theory became accepted at the end of the 19th century, the bathroom became a
hospital room, with fixtures of porcelain and lined with tile or marble. These materials
are expensive; as the bathroom became mainstream and accessible to all classes, it got
smaller. The plumbers lined everything up in a row to use less pipe. By about 1910 the
bathroom is pretty much indistinguishable from the ones built today.
Nobody seriously paused to think about the different functions and their needs; they
just took the position that if water comes in and water goes out, it is all pretty much the
same and should be in the same room. Nobody thought about how the water from a
shower or bathtub (greywater) is different from the water from a toilet (blackwater); it all
just went down the same drain which connected to the same sewer pipe that gathered
the rainwater from the streets, and carried it away to be dumped in the river or lake.
It is hard to find something that we actually got right in the modern bathroom. The toilet
is too high (our bodies were designed to squat), the sink is too low and almost useless;
the shower is a deathtrap (an American dies every day from bath or shower accidents).
We fill this tiny, inadequately ventilated room with toxic chemicals ranging from nail
polish to tile cleaners. We flush the toilet and send bacteria into the air, with our
toothbrush in a cup a few feet away. We take millions of gallons of fresh water and
contaminate it with toxic chemicals, human waste, antibiotics and birth control
hormones in quantities large enough to change the gender of fish.
We mix up all our bodily functions in a machine designed by engineers on the basis of
the plumbing system, not human needs. The result is a toxic output of contaminated
water, questionable air quality and incredible waste. We just cant afford to do it this
way any more.
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management far apart, and rarely had epidemics of typhoid or cholera. They would
never think of putting the toilet in the same room as the tub. Instead of treating bathing
as a chore, they turned it into a truly enjoyable ritual.
The Japanese used to sell their excrement; the rich got more money for theirs because
they had better diets and made better quality fertilizer. They farmed more intensively
and had fewer farm animals, (as we probably should) and needed a lot of it. In China, the
proverb said: Treasure night soil as if it were gold. It was valuable stuff then and still is
today.
In a world where we are running out of fresh water, making artificial fertilizer from fossil
fuels and approaching peak phosphorus, it is idiotic and almost criminal that we pay
huge amounts in taxes to use drinking water to flush away our personal fertilizer and
phosphorus and dump it in the ocean. In the future, they should be paying us.
Bathrooms and toilets - a history in pictures
Composting toilets - a growing movement in green disposal
Lloyd Alter is managing editor of TreeHugger.
Interested in finding out more about how you can live better? Take a look at this month's
Live Better Challenge here.
The Live Better Challenge is funded by Unilever; its focus is sustainable living. All content is
editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more
here.
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