Flushed Away
February 26, 2025 at 03:36AMFor Slate, Anna Gibbs writes a delightful piece on the evolution of modern water-efficient toilets. (OK, maybe not everyone would call it delightful—but as a fan of 💩 reads, I find it genuinely fascinating.) The first generation of low-flow toilets, mandated by the 1992 Energy Policy Act to conserve water, faced widespread backlash in the 1990s due to their, well, shitty performance. Whether they required multiple flushes to fully clear waste or constant scrubbing to remove streaks, these early models often ended up wasting more water than they saved. Thanks to the research of engineers John Koeller and Bill Gauley—who focus on water conservation—toilet design has come a long way. Today’s water-efficient models not only outperform their predecessors but also use as little as 1.28 gallons per flush—saving households up to 13,000 gallons of water per year. Gibbs’ reporting on Koeller and Gauley’s work, especially their unique (and hilarious) testing methods, is both informative and unexpectedly entertaining.
There’s one group that has yet to completely embrace the low-flow toilet: consumers. It’s not that people aren’t buying them. (There is a mandate in place, after all.) But people continue to blame low-flow products for their bathroom problems, and generally disdain them. In 2019, Donald Trump brought the conversation back to the national stage when he complained about having to flush “10 times” with low-flow toilets (and then, realizing the implication, added a hasty “Not me, but you” and pointed to a poor fellow in the crowd). On his very first day back in office this January, he signed an executive order promising, among other things, “to safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose”—toilets, that is.
In an attempt to find material that mimicked the density and moisture content of human waste, Gauley started flushing all kinds of things down the toilet: mashed potatoes, mashed bananas, various concoctions of flour mixed with water. The material had to be thick enough to make a log, and maintain that consistency as tests took place.
More toilet reads
Braindump: A Reading List on the Future of Sanitation, Toilets, and Bathrooms
“On the future of toilets and bathrooms, and innovation across the field of sanitation and waste management.”
Really Good Shit: A Reading List
“As the Japanese children’s book author Tarō Gomi once wrote: everyone poops. But we don’t talk about this openly or often enough.”
The Poop Broker
“Michael Harrop started a booming underground market for human feces. Something smells off.”
Pooping on the Moon Is a Messy Business
“If humans are to return to the moon, space agencies and governments need to figure out the legal, ethical, and practical dimensions of extraterrestrial waste management.”
The Quest to Turn Human Waste Into Medicine
“After success in early stage trials, MaaT Pharma is on the verge of becoming the first company to have an approved microbiome-related product for cancer care.”
The Power of Shit
“Our excrement is a natural, renewable and sustainable resource – if only we can overcome our visceral disgust of it.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/02/25/flushed-away/
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