Is the World Ready for the Waterless Urinal?
In a laboratory 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, a mechanical penis sputters to life. A technician starts a timer as a stream of water erupts from the apparatus’s brass tip, arcing into a urinal mounted exactly 12 inches away. James Krug smiles. His latest back-splatter experiment is under way.
Krug is an unusual entrepreneur. Twenty years ago, he was a rising star in the film and television business. He served as a vice president of the Disney Channel in the 1980s and ran a distribution company with members of the Disney family in the ’90s. But 11 years ago, Krug became convinced that the world did not need another TV show. What it needed was a better urinal.
His transformation from Hollywood player to urinal evangelist began in 1999 at the Universal Studios Hilton in LA. A business acquaintance of Krug knew that he was interested in exploring new opportunities and arranged a meeting with Ditmar Gorges, a German engineer who fervently believed that flushing a urinal was a waste of water. Sitting in the Hilton lobby, Gorges gushed potty talk. He explained that he had invented a water-free urinal and pointed out that urine was already liquid—and a generally sterile liquid at that. Gravity could drain it completely. No flush necessary
Krug immediately grasped the implications: The German’s humble innovation had the potential to save millions of gallons of water at a time when demand for the natural resource was draining aquifers dry. It would do more than any film or TV show to solve a pressing problem. Krug decided to help.
Drawing on sales skills he’d honed at the Cannes Film Festival, Krug dived into the bathroom business. He formed Falcon Waterfree Technologies with Gorges and explained to anyone who would listen that the water-free urinal would save more than just water: In California, a fifth of the electrical output was consumed by processing and pumping water. Cutting water usage would reduce our carbon footprint.
Falcon wasn’t the first to develop a waterless urinal. A company near San Diego had been struggling to sell them since 1991. But Krug made a conceptual breakthrough: The real profits wouldn’t come from the urinals themselves. They’d come from selling the replaceable cartridges that sat in each of the waterless receptacles.
In a traditional urinal, water pools in the drain after every flush, preventing sewer gases from escaping into living areas. Gorges’ invention employed a plastic cartridge filled with a liquid sealant. Urine could pass through, but sewer gases remained trapped beneath the sealant—no water needed. The $40 cartridge had to be replaced after 7,000 uses, turning a onetime urinal purchase into a perpetual income stream. Krug’s business model took a page out of the Gillette playbook: Keep the urinal cost low and lock customers in to buying the cartridges.
He quickly won converts. Cable tycoon Marc Nathanson made a substantial investment in early 2000, and in 2001 Falcon began to manufacture its urinal, dubbed the U1P. Soon Al Gore signed on as an adviser, and in 2006, Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay, made a significant investment. Krug was sure the world was ready for a better bowl—there hadn’t been any major advances in urinal technology for decades—but there was something he wasn’t prepared for: the plumbers.
Mike Massey didn’t like Krug’s urinal. As head of PIPE, a plumbing union advocacy group in Southern California, Massey looks out for plumbers’ interests. And as far as he was concerned, the waterless urinal was a threat to public health. Diseases might fester because the urinals weren’t being washed down with every use. Sewer gasses might leak through the cartridge. “People take plumbing for granted,” Massey says. “But the reality is that plumbers protect the health of the nation. That’s how we think of our job.”
Plumbing codes never contemplated a urinal without water. As a result, Falcon’s fixtures couldn’t be installed legally in most parts of the country. Krug assumed it would be a routine matter to amend the model codes on which most state and city codes are based, but Massey and other plumbers began to argue vehemently against it. The reason the urinal hadn’t changed in decades was because it worked, they argued. Urine could be dangerous, Massey said, and the urinal was not something to trifle with. As a result, in 2003 the organizations that administer the two dominant model codes in the US rejected Falcon’s request to permit installation of waterless urinals. “The plumbers blindsided us,” Krug says. “We didn’t understand what we were up against.”
Krug scrambled to counter the plumbers’ public health claims. He hired Charles Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona. Gerba studies “filth, pestilence, and disease,” with an emphasis on the bathroom, and says he has done more field studies on the toilet than anyone else in academia. From his point of view, there was a clear explanation for the plumbers’ resistance: It drained their wallets. “Plumbers don’t like the waterless urinal because it cuts down on their work tremendously,” he says. “There’s no more piping to install, and the urinals have no moving parts to repair.”
To test the plumbers’ assertions, Gerba compared a traditional flush urinal with the Falcon waterless. He found that the Falcon urinal presented a less hospitable environment for germs than constantly moistened conventional bowls. The process of flushing could actually eject those germs into the air. “If it’s a traditional urinal, you should flush and run,” Gerba says.
The plumbers reject the contention that their opposition was an attempt to protect their livelihoods. “We just weren’t so sure this was a good product,” Massey says. “People think we’re a bunch of dumb plumbers, but we’re actually quite sophisticated.”
To buttress their health claims, plumbing unions in California hired Phyllis Fox, an environmental engineer and water quality specialist. She conducted her own analysis, which involved visiting men’s rooms to acquaint herself with the subject matter. Fox didn’t perform any tests, but by examining the designs of the Falcon and other waterless urinals, she concluded that hydrogen sulfide gases in the sewer lines could escape when the cartridges were replaced, resulting in “unconsciousness, respiratory paralysis, and death.” In other words, the waterless urinal could kill.
Replies
Ever hear of Clivus Multrum? Their waterless urinals have been in operation since the early 70's. The southbound rest stop on NH Interstate 95 has had a Clivus system in place for many years but its currently under renovation. Not sure if they will stay waterless. There is a pungent odor.
http://www.clivusmultrum.com/
No, I Haven't
but the new type waterless urinals are a great improvement. No smell, if the guys don't piss all over the floor. I thought is was interesting that the unions hired a professional liar to make their case. In a commercial setting, the waste lines the hot and cold and drains for all the lavs, their not going to lose any work over this. They'll just get to extend their breaks a little longer.
Used to be some waterless toilets at a rest stop in the Rockies, I'm thinking along Trail Ridge Road. They were fully "modern" toilets (too much traffic for the old style "waterless"), but they used some sort of recirculating oil or some such in place of water. The oil didn't mix with the water and "other stuff" in the toilets, so it could be recirculated, and the toilets could function in freezing weather (even if you couldn't) without having to be heated.
Dunno if they're still there.