A toilet, a toilet. My kingdom for a toilet...

[hitssquad]

If the water-saving-toilets-are-anything-but issue can get make it onto Oprah, the laws requiring them might have a chance of getting flushed. Barring that, there are some hyper-expensive toilets with exotic features such as:

• flush pipes that are a little bit wider than standard and thus are almost wide-enough to function properly
  
• flush pipes that are porcelain coated, and thus slick instead of ultra-rough
  
• venturi-effect charged-air-reservoir powerflush with powerblaster nozzle directed at the flush pipe -- sounds like a 12-gauge shotgun blast -- you can really feel it hit you in your gut when you flush it

I have used the latter. It plugs up like the rest of them -- just not as often.

Like I was saying above, I think I would rather just freeze-dry, crush and save-for-once-in-a-long-while-disposal my contributions. Plumbing is so last-century.

[Insight Driver]

Maybe just an outhouse. wait.. don't you dare put a new moon cutout in there door!

[game_hunter]

Come on now. The moon cut out is classic.

[Minnesota]

My toilet has a one gallon flush. It works better than the upstairs toilet that uses five gallons. If it does plug you can flush it two or three times and still save water.

[Insight Driver]

For those with low-flush toilets:

Diet makes all the difference on how soft the stool is. I eat only whole-grain bread (freshly ground wheat from our electric grain mill), legumes and a lot of whole vegetables. Getting the proper percentage of fiber, nutritents and fluids makes all the difference in how easy it is to flush. I also know what makes my stools hard, clay-like, or whatever. What goes in one end comes out the other. That's just how it is.

[Bill Burkett]

Our buidler installed American Standard toilets with the Champion flush system. Haven't had a single clog and I am known far and wide for my ability to induce them.

The site below has video of the toilet in action with sponges, napkins, and rubber tubes. Thank goodness.

http://www.americanstandard-us.com/plandesign/performance/BestFlush/best_flush.asp

[hitssquad]

Once astronauts have finished using the WCS, they open the valve and expose the contents to the vacuum of space. All solid wastes get instantly freeze-dried and de-odourised.

This is giving me an idea for a new invention and consumer product: the Poop-B-Gone line of plumbless toilets. I found some cheap freeze-dryers here...
http://www.labx.com/v2/newad.cfm?CatID=85

...so perhaps a plumbless toilet could be sold to the consumer for only a few thousand dollars. I am imagining entire housing tracts, or even cities, without sewer lines. Property taxes would be lower. Monthly sewer bills would be gone. Land development would be cheaper and faster with no sewer lines to run from the houses -- though there would be storm drains and lines for the steets. In a domed city, there would not even be a need for storm drains on the streets since there would never be any rain.

Poop-and-flush will be a thing of the past and thought of in the future as crude and unsanitary. The future belongs to Poop-B-Gone.

[Minnesota]

The author of the Humanure book predicts that as water becomes more scarce that all of our waste will go into a receptical in the basement and that it will be regularily emptied by a garbage type guy with a pump on the end of a hose just like a septic tank is now emptied only more often. Sewage, garbage and recyling all on the same truck. Or perhaps on the same day anyway.

[hitssquad]

Minnesota,

I would think it would make financial sense to use nuclear electricity to dry the poop/urine first before having it hauled away with a truck running on liquid fuels.

By the way, I saw this today on another website:




I think it might just be a photoshop, but this might be a real carbon-fiber toilet seat:
http://www.dynamiccomposites.com/products.html

[Insight Driver]

I doubt I would care to spend over $200 for a toilet seat.

[TCLynx]

I still think dehydrating the materials and having them hauled away to a landfill or sewage treatment is a waste.

[Insight Driver]

I think it is environementally responsible to use whatever system the local authorities decree as proper for the geology of the loacl environement. Just my two cents. I don't think the old technolgies are bad, per se. I do think there can be modern thinking applied and newer ways of dealing with waste responsibly.

[hitssquad]

TC,

Another option would be semi-permanent onsite storage. It works for nuclear power plants.

[Minnesota]

I don't think nuclear anything makes much sense until we figure out what to do with the waste. I also don't think cask storage is the permanent answer

[Insight Driver]

How was the nuclear material created or collected? From what I understand, ore is mined and smelted and reduced and purified and concentrated until enough of it is pure enough to work as fuel.

Since it wasn't created, as far as I know, then why don't we disperse it again into the very low background concentration that exists in the earth alread?