Last month we learned that, in an attempt to cut down on litter, the supervisor of Grand Canyon National Park was set to ban sales of bottled water within the park, starting in January of 2011. (Dasani is the brand sold by concessionaires.) But two weeks before the ban was due to go into effect, the head of the national park system balked. Dasani water would stay, out of “concern for public safety in a desert park.” (Never mind that Utah’s Zion National Park had enacted a similar ban, to great acclaim, in 2008.) Soon the relationship between Coca-Cola, which produces Dasani from tap water, and our national parks was revealed: over a period of years, the corporation has given $13 million to the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit that generates private donations for the park system.
Environmentalists are up in arms — about the continued (and continuously promoted) use of disposable plastic water bottles, of course, but more importantly about the heavy influence of corporations in public spaces and debate. There are some angry comments on blogs about the issue, and many people erroneously seem to believe that park visitors would be stripped of any water bottles they carried into the park. Not true. Nor was it likely that the death toll from dehydration would rise. The parks and concessionaries had spent $300,000 developing “filling stations” in preparation for the ban; it’s hard to escape pro-hydration messages in the park (they’re everywhere), and it’s easy to buy reusable bottles on park grounds if you don’t already have them.
For readers who can’t remember what personal hydrological conditions were like 30 years ago, suffice it to say that single-serve plastic bottles of water were not ubiquitous. And yet millions still hiked and camped, carried water, filtered water where they found it, and sometimes waited until they reached their destination (!) to slake their thirst from a fountain or sink.
I hiked and camped in the Grand Canyon in the Pre-Perrier Period. I learned, on a day that I hauled my heavy backpack more than twenty miles across the Tonto Platform and up the South Canyon rim, that thirst can be a great motivator. Our multiple water bottles had long run dry, and we were reduced to eating dry oatmeal in our desperation for calories, with five miles yet to go. All I could focus on was the ice-cold elixir that flowed at trail’s end from a fountain in the dimly lit lobby of the Bright Angel Hotel. (Reader: I survived. I hope this water fountain has, too.)
The Coca-Cola-National Parks fracas seems to be taking on a life of its own, to both groups’ detriment. Dozens of media outlets have picked up on the story, and already more than 94,000 people have signed a pro-ban petition at Change.org. Here’s hoping that the will of the environmentally minded, rather than a corporation representing the interests of its shareholders, will prevail.
Editor's Note: I highly recommend this book. You can purchase in the Adventures store. The price will be the same as if purchased directly from Amazon. Adventures receives a small percentage of the purchase price which goes to the production of this site.
Rose George, author of 2008′s shockingly forthright and shockingly entertaining The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, has a bone to pick with hydro-philanthropists, whether species Hollywood (Matt Damon excepted) or species Rotary Club. They’ll raise money to dig wells for thirsty Africans, but they’re loath to address the dire need for adequate toilets (or their culturally appropriate equivalent).
And yet: two thirds of the world’s population has no toilet or latrine, and diarrhea kills more children annually than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. (If that’s too abstract a number, picture a jumbo jet full of children crashing every two hours, every day.) Feces are indeed, as George notes, “a weapon of mass destruction.”
In “Shit: A Survival Guide,” the monothematic fall issue of Colors magazine, George introduces readers to sanitation evangelists and to the brave folks who clean our sewer pipes and alleyways. She also considers the roles of fear and shame in toilet use and looks at the wide world of alternatives to a porcelain throne (meet the flying toilet).
More than a cultural tour of toileting and its discontents, the magazine explores a smorgasbord of dichotomies: shit kills and it saves lives; it pollutes water and promotes plant growth; it stinks and it can be used to cook food. A graphically hip précis of Big Necessity, the Survival Guide goes well beyond the usual lamentations for decent toileting facilities to question some basic assumptions about where, when, and how we go. It’s become common in urban green circles to question the wisdom of using expensively treated drinking water — especially in water-short places — to flush away human excrement, but George forces us to question the morality of flushing away such a valuable fertilizer. There’s phosphorous and nitrogen in them thar feces.
(November 19 was World Toilet Day, which is meant to draw attention to the importance of sanitation around the world. Check out Matt Damon “talking sh*t” [or typing, via twitter and facebook] for an entire week at Talk Sh*t All Week. Meanwhile, WaterAid and Amnesty International have launched Give A Crap About Human Rights, highlighting the rights to water and sanitation in the context of housing and women’s rights. Learn more about the day that dare not speak its name at World Toilet Day.
After two and a half years of steady pressure from the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, the American Nurses Association, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, Johnson & Johnson has agreed to phase out its use of a formaldehyde-releasing preservative, listed as quaternium-15, in its baby products. (You can read the company’s statement here.) Formaldehyde is classified by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as a known human carcinogen at high levels of exposure. J&J had been selling formaldehyde-free baby shampoo in other nations but had, to date, resisted CSC pressure (in the form of a massive letter-writing campaign and a series of sit-down powwows with J & J honchos) to change its formulations in the U.S., where the FDA permits its use.
Formaldehyde levels in Johnson & Johnson’s shampoo were relatively low, but remember that babies and children are, pound for pound, exposed to many more chemicals than we larger folk, and they’re exposed to them at a vulnerable time in their development. Children also tend to put stuff in their mouths and crawl around on floors and rugs, where they’re exposed to both the residue of cleaning products and dust, where contaminants like flame retardants abide. And so their body burden grows.
Retooling formulas and getting them into production will be costly for J&J, but a consumer boycott may have been worse — both for the company’s finances and its reputation, especially once the mommy bloggers (who effectively removed BPA from baby bottles in the absence of federal leadership) fully sunk their teeth into this. Of course, if the feds banned the use of formaldehyde in such products altogether — taking a systemic rather than a piecemeal approach to this problem (the aim of the Safe Cosmetics Act of 2011) — the playing field for all U.S. shampoo makers would be leveled; this two-and-a-half-year exercise could have been avoided; and people who buy baby shampoo wouldn’t be left squinting at tiny labels in the health and beauty aisle of their supermarkets. Congratulations, and thank you, Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, et alia! (Now, let’s hope that Johnson & Johnson is clear about the properties of the preservative that will take quaternium-15′s place.)
I recently watched an online documentary that filled me with solid-waste envy. Unwasted: The Future of Business on Earthdetails how companies, institutions, political leaders and activists are reducing waste in and around Seattle. It’s a pretty good, if somewhat staid, primer on how landfills work (or don’t), how many recycling programs fail to capture all they can, and how a zero-waste framework can guide cities to a more sustainable future. (Zero Waste is a rhetorical term: advocates believe we can reasonably divert 90 percent of our waste from landfills and incinerators — including high-tech gasifiers — within the next ten years. To learn more about how, read this uplifting article from the Sustainable Cities Network.)
Why did the doc make me green? Because of the tremendous enthusiasm for, and political will directed toward, reducing consumption, reusing, and recovering resources in the Pacific Northwest. Where I live, in New York City, it’s difficult to even find out where our waste is going, let alone why businesses are rarely penalized for failing to recycle. (New York City households recycle a miserable 15 percent of their waste, compared with Seattle’s 51 and San Francisco’s 77 — see this Green City Index from Siemens for other metropolitan averages.) One talking head in the film urges viewers to “visit your landfill and see what it looks like.” Ha, I said to myself. My waste is exported far, far away, and landfill managers in the East would rather dump a dead body than let me in the front gate. (Read Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash for my personal work-around and see my video interview with Adventures.)
According to Unwasted (which was produced by Seattle’s Sage Environmental Services in partnership with PorterWorks), landfilling materials is more expensive than recycling (alas, this isn’t true in the vast middle of the country, where land values are lower), and maintaining and monitoring a landfill can cost a municipality $20 million over its mandatory 30-year post-closure period. The film stresses the significance of transparency in both manufacturing and disposal. “If more people knew what went into a product, they’d make an educated decision” about buying it in the first place, says another talking head. An excellent point, and a good reason for all elementary school teachers to ask their students, “Do you know how this pencil sharpener (backpack, T-shirt, etc.) was made?”
Of course, Seattle has a lot going for it: a density high enough to achieve economies of scale, an educated population, access to markets for recyclable materials (including food and yard waste), and volume-based disposal fees that reward household recycling over landfilling. Maybe it’s time for New York to reconsider a switch to pay-as-you-throw as well. (Here’s NRDC, in 1997, on the subject.)
Photo from Seattle Municipal Archives via Wikimedia Commons
A new survey commissioned by SC Johnson on American attitudes and behaviors with respect to the environment reveals that individuals feel as if they know more about the environment today than they did 20 years ago (yay). But they also feel less powerful to do anything to improve the environment (boo). Still, influencing behavior is possible (yay). How? It turns out that financial incentives and penalties are the dominant motivators (deposits on beverage bottles are an example of this phenomenon). Coming in second is the influence of friends and family members. Sadly — considering all the effort and expense — only 12 percent of respondents said they took action prompted by a nonprofit organization. The only weaker force, influencing 7 percent of respondents, was “A celebrity I respect encourages me to take action.” (Sorry, Ms. Diaz, Mr. Damon, Ms. Hannah.)
I don’t put a lot of stock in this survey — it was small, and most people overestimate the depth of their greenness — but it did help explain why Recyclebank continues to grow. Recyclebank is a program that rewards people who recycle with discounts on consumer goods. Your participating waste hauler weighs your household’s recyclables at the curb, and Recyclebank mails you the coupons, up to $40 worth a month. When I checked its website, the “featured rewards” included energy bars and single-serve smoothies in nonrecyclable packaging and carbon-offset coupons that support landfill-gas-to-energy projects. (Note the synergy: the smoothie packaging ends up in a landfill, where it generates methane that the landfill vacuums up and sells. I almost forgot to mention: Waste Management, Inc. &mash; which makes money off hauling waste, tipping in landfills, selling landfill gas, and recycling — recently made a strategic investment in Recyclebank.)
Recyclebank operates in more than 300 U.S. cities and in London, where, in collaboration with Transport for London, it plans to roll out a program, at year’s end, that encourages people to walk or bike instead of drive. Monitored by a smartphone app, the self-propelled will get offers and discounts from companies like Marks & Spencer. (How will the company know if a trip on foot or bike is replacing a car trip? Unclear.) My biggest gripe with this attempt to modify behavior, besides the fact that it will invite even more advertising into one’s life, is that it rewards “green” actions with opportunities to buy more stuff, which no one visiting this website needs to be told generally has a negative impact on the environment.
Still, if the Johnson study is correct, and people act greener when it helps their bottom line (certainly most of my green actions save me money), how about rewarding the virtuous walkers and recyclers exclusively with experiences and services rather than consumptive pleasures? Tickets to concerts or museums, for example. Downloads of music or books, gym passes, coupons for testing tap water, home energy audits, vasectomies! Or how about an app, leading to nonconsumptive awards, that notes every time you seriously consider buying something but then decide … not to.
After reading the following news items, I’m thinking that investing in companies that make top-notch and easy-to-maintain water filtration equipment might be a good idea.
Last week, Environmental Health News reported on widespread contamination of private wells with naturally occurring elements like arsenic and manganese. In its first-ever effort to track two dozen elements, the U.S. Geological Society discovered that “13 percent of untreated drinking water contains at least one element at a concentration that exceeds federal health regulations or guidelines. That rate far outpaces other contaminants in well water, including industrial chemicals and pesticides.” For public water systems, the presence of these elements is less concerning, since utilities test for and remove those for which the feds have set standards. But the 60 million Americans who rely on private wells are on their own: a good reason to expand the list of contaminants you ask your local lab to test for — annually. Read the USGS report and peruse its element maps here (pdf). Contact your state drinking-water program to find a state or EPA-certified lab to test your well water (and then buy the appropriate filter if the results don’t please you).
On the other side of the world, the island groups of Tuvalu and Tokelau have declared water emergencies. La Nina weather patterns have reduced rainfall, and what groundwater remains has turned brackish from rising sea levels. (Tuvalu, you may recall, was the first nation to formulate a climate-change evacuation plan.) Citizens are rationing water, says the Washington Post, crops are wilting, and fruit trees, a major food source, are suffering. Portable desalination plants have been ordered. Meanwhile, residents are drinking bottled water.
In California, water managers desperate for new sources of supply are contemplating … Superfund sites! According to the Whittier Daily News, the Walnut Valley Water District is considering buying water pumped and treated from polluted areas of the San Gabriel Basin. “Parts of the basin have been polluted with perchlorate and other contaminants leaked by the aerospace and defense industries that used to dominate the region, resulting in one of the nation’s biggest Superfund sites.” Other U.S. cities are already purifying sewage effluent and the brackish water that occurs thousands of feet below freshwater aquifers. How do they clean the water? With ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis, which removes the vast majority of things that should worry us. (Filtration plus reverse osmosis is the method used by Aquafina, Dasani, Nestle Pure Life, and other major bottled-water brands to further “purify” tap water that already meets federal drinking-water standards.)
Unfortunately, reverse osmosis is expensive, it uses a great deal of energy, and it produces a lot of unusable waste in the form of brine (and probably worse, in the case of that California Superfund site). It’s all well and good to agitate for better watershed protection and tighter controls of discharges to surface and groundwater, but faced with naturally occurring, harmful elements, and saltwater intrusion, and limited quantities of fresh water for growing populations, I’m afraid that filtering will be a big part of our future.
Visiting the eastern side of California’s San Joaquin Valley recently, I burned a lot of fossil fuel getting the lay of the land. The Valley: flat, semi-arid, and planted wall-to-wall with fruit trees, nut trees, cotton, corn, and alfalfa. Ditches — some of them offshoots of the 152-mile Friant-Kern Canal — paralleled roadways and fields, delivering relatively pristine surface water to farms, ranches, and giant dairies. Pumps pulled groundwater for domestic (and sometimes agricultural) use. To the east: the glorious golden foothills of the Sierra Nevada. High above them: the great water factory of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, from whence the Kings, Kern, Tule and Kaweah Rivers flow west, through the foothills and into the ditches and drains of the valley, where they’re fought over tooth and nail.
I drove east and uphill early one morning to marvel at the sequoias, pay my respects to the General Sherman Tree, and ponder the mindset that, 70 years ago, decreed the nearly half million acres of Kings Canyon off limits to development and exploitation. (Thank you, Harold Ickes, who as Secretary of the Interior hired Ansel Adams to photograph the forests and canyons and sway public opinion.) Sequoia National Park, slightly smaller and to the south, had been established in 1890. Having done little upland research before this trip, I was astounded to see how few roads traversed these tracts. In fact, Kings Canyon is the second largest roadless area in the lower 48, and an astonishing 84 percent of the park is accessible only on foot. The longer I drove — and the more jaw-dropping the views of the John Muir Wilderness and the alpine peaks of the Great Western Divide — the more I marveled at the foresight of political leaders who could leave so much alone. Only around 4,000 people a year, out of 2 million park visitors, venture into the vast mountain fortress of the backcountry, with its granite canyons, subalpine meadows, and glacially scoured lakes — the classic High Sierra landscape immortalized by Adams and countless nature-themed calendars. Despite the low visitation, the protections hold. At a time when states are finding it difficult to finance the repair of such basic infrastructure as bridges and water mains, how would we ever find the political will today, to say nothing of the money, to set aside wilderness for its own sake?
This landscape could have been carved into vacation homes, grazing allotments, timber yards, mines, or ski resorts (Disney tried the latter in the late 1970s, at the southern end of the park). But cooler heads and grander visions prevailed. Today’s visitors surely appreciate the spiritual and aesthetic values of these wildlands, but its managers don’t stress, in their communications with the general public, the topography’s intimate connection with the regional economy. Careening downhill from an elevation of 8,000 feet back to 300, one can’t help noting that the Sierra’s prodigious cascades, streams, and rivers — with the help of dams, ditches and canals — have combined and conspired to make the Valley one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. (And yes, this water is ultimately tainted by agricultural inputs, but that’s a story for another day.)
Patagonia has long been near the Alpine pinnacle of green-leaning businesses. The outdoor clothing company leads the way with eco-friendly offices, conscientious sourcing of materials, environmental campaigns, and its 1% for the Planet program. Patagonia has also exhaustively researched the environmental footprint of its gear — both where its material comes from and how products are made, as well as the impact once they’re sold, which includes laundering and ironing clothes, as as well as their eventual disposal to landfills and incinerators.
After all that research, the company last week launched its Common Threads Initiative, which asks potential customers to pledge to cut consumption of the stuff they don’t really need — a message both radical and conservative. Then, after pondering your heart’s desire, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard seems to be saying, go ahead and buy our stuff, because it will last a long time and does less environmental (and social) harm in its manufacture than similar products made by other companies.
The initiative also asks customers to fix their Patagonia products before buying new ones (Patagonia repairs goods under warranty and offers free advice for fixing things such as waders, in the field, on the cheap), then reuse or resell unwanted Patagucci through the company’s new partnership with E-Bay. Surely this is the first time a major retailer has actively encouraged its customers to seek used products instead of slapping down cash for new ones. (Apple goes in the opposite direction, actively thwarting repair and upgrade of some items with nonstandard screws.)
Recycling, of course, is at the bottom of the three-R hierarchy, and Patagonia years ago began accepting old and presumably unmarketable Capilene undies (through the mail or hand delivered to their stores, preferably by bike), then shipping them to Japan, where they’re washed, deconstructed, and remanufactured into fluffy new Capilene baselayers. (It doesn’t seem like this has been a crashing success: in five years, the company says it has taken back 45 tons of clothing for recycling and made 34 tons of that into new clothes. No word on how many tons of Capilene its stores annually sell.)
I’m a firm believer that one of the most important things an individual can do to cut his or her environmental footprint is to buy less stuff, because mining, milling, manufacturing, packaging and transporting new consumer goods generates far more pollution and waste than the tiny fraction we actually see on the curb come garbage day. We all need to rethink what we actually need; buy used; repair the old; borrow; rent. E-bay is a big help here (three cheers for its reusable packaging program); so are Craigslist and Freecycle.
But I’m not sure I’d buy used fleece anywhere. One of the textile’s most visceral attractions is its primordial purity and softness. I wouldn’t wish my old Pattagonia fleeces on anyone: they’re stained, stiff, their cushy loft worn away by more than a decade of hard and happy use. I can see how the Common Threads model might work if garments are in great shape, but otherwise it seems like a bit of a fig leaf — not quite greenwashing (because of its solid educational component) but still managing to evoke in me a longing for something shiny and new. (Don’t get me started on the wanderlust inspired by Patagonia’s catalogs, website, and even its E-Bay site, the quest for peak adventures in pristine locales, and their attendant carbon footprint …)
I applaud Patagonia for focusing on these issues. I think Chouinard, who has grappled for years with the meaning of “sustainable” business, has his heart in the right place. But I can’t get over the duality of a clothing company banging its eco drum and also continuously changing its styles. Sure, technologies and designs improve, but change for change’s sake is the fundamental driver of the fashion industry. If colors and shapes, hyped by the fashion media, didn’t go in and out of style, surely we’d desire considerably fewer clothes. Style obsolescence, invented with mass production technologies in the ‘20s and ‘30s, was a key driver of consumption and its attendant waste.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Patagonia, as their clothing holds up exceptionally well: that’s why we’re willing to pay more for their products. (One of the most important ways the fashion industry could help the planet — and garment workers — is to do away with cheap, disposable fashion.) But the company persists — damn them! — in enticing me with fresh colors and intriguing shapes.
So far, I resist: I’m still wearing my Patagonia Stand Up shorts twenty years down the road. The Velcro on the back pockets is shot, but otherwise they’re doing fine. And yet: I may have aged out of their mid-thigh length. Does anyone want to make an offer?
Almost every place scientists have looked for the residue of pharmaceuticals in our waterways, they’ve found them: in wastewater, in drinking water, in high-elevation mountain streams and in rivers at the bottoms of watersheds.
The drugs come from people, who ingest and then excrete them; from the dumping of unused drugs down toilets; from leaking septic tanks; and from confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which regularly treat their chickens, cows and pigs with antibiotics and hormones that then leach into soil and water. Many of the drugs have been shown to harm aquatic life, causing premature spawning in shellfish and feminizing male fin fish.
Over the last few years, studies in India and in New York state have revealed another source of drugs: waste water discharged from pharmaceutical manufacturing plants. A new study, reported in Nature News this week, shows the same thing happening in France, where one would think the discharge of pollutants would be more tightly regulated.
One would be wrong. Neither wastewater treatment plants nor drug manufacturers, in the U.S. or the EU, are required to monitor or limit their discharge of pharmaceuticals. It’s clearly time for that to change, as levels of drugs near manufacturing plants were far higher than levels near treatment plant outfalls. (According to Nature News: “Downstream from the [French] factory, the researchers found that on average 60 percent, and in one case 80 percent, of the fish had both male and female sexual characteristics. Upstream of the effluent discharge, such intersex fish made up just 5 percent of the populations.”)
While reporting on drugs in our waterways for OnEarth in 2006, I was told by a spokesperson from the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association that redesigning drugs to break down more readily into less harmful components would be difficult: “There’s a trade-off in terms of having molecules break down readily versus having a stable molecule that does its work as a medicine and has a reasonable shelf life.”
If the drugs can’t change, how about better pre-treatment before discharging waste? The European Commission is considering tighter regulations on such discharges; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, never keen on the precautionary approach, is continuing to study the fate of scores of different drugs and their metabolites in our waterways.
At a recent panel on extended producer responsibility at the National Conference of State Legislatures, a representative from PhRMA — perhaps anxious about assuming liability for drugs’ unintended downstream impacts — maintained that the levels of these compounds in waterways was barely detectable. That may be true, but scientists are detecting scores of different drugs using sophisticated lab equipment, and fish — especially the wild gudgeon (Gobio gobio), the focus of the French study — are detecting them all on their own and reacting to them in ways likely to hinder their reproductive success. In short, our unwillingness to take swift action may soon drive these creatures locally extinct.
UPDATE: To learn more about improvements to prescribing and dispensing practices, with an aim to reducing the entry of drugs into the environment, check out “Green pharmacy and pharmEcoVigilance: Prescribing and the Planet,” by Christian D. Daughton and Ilene S. Ruhoy. The paper appears in Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology, 2011, 4(2):211-232.
People who live in dry places are forced — by their water bills (one hopes), or by public education campaigns or their parched lawns — to think about water conservation. But why should people with full reservoirs and aquifers care?
The standard (and true) answer is that it takes money and energy to pump, treat, and deliver the water we drink, and the water with which we irrigate our gardens and flush our toilets. But in New York City, where I live, and in many older cities with combined sanitary and storm water systems, there’s another reason to conserve water: big rain storms. As little as 1/20th of an inch of rainfall can, in parts of the city, overwhelm wastewater treatment plants. The plants shut down, and water from both systems — containing pathogens, hydrocarbons, solvents, heavy metals, street litter, and more — is shunted untreated into nearby bodies of water.
A combined sewer overflow (CSO) Credit: Boards Windsurfing
It had already been raining for more than twelve hours when I went out for a stroll in my sewer-shed last Sunday afternoon. I wanted to take a look at Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, which hosts 14 combined-sewer outfalls. In the mud-colored water, I noted a lot of floating leaves, oil sheen, and the usual street- and toilet-flushed “floatables” (not my word; the DEP’s), including the common Coney Island whitefishSlang: A used condom on Coney Island beach; now used interchangeably with whitefish as a generic term for any used condom found in public.. The outfall pipes were doing their job — they were flowing.
Later, my husband, Peter, and I went out for dinner. We sat in the window of a Thai restaurant and watched bicycle deliverymen stream up the avenue in wind- and rain-whipped ponchos. When the waiter asked, “How is everything?” I decided to be honest. The “stir fry of aquatic vegetables” was overwhelmingly salty. He asked if he could take it back, but I demurred. I had already eaten half of it.
While Peter asked for the check, I went to the bathroom. Imagine my delight when I saw the toilet had a dual-flush mechanism! I dashed back to tell Peter, who was signing the credit card slip while the maitre d’ hovered. “I took the vegetables off the bill,” she said pointedly as I filled out the proffered comment card. “I’m not writing about the vegetables,” I said, excitedly. “I’m applauding your dual-flush toilet.”
Credit: Lori Wark
“Our what?”
I explained the two half circles on the flushing mechanism (a little flush, using a half circle, for this; a bigger flush, depressing both sides, for that), but decided to skip explaining the imperative to conserve water during big rain events.
“I thought that split flusher was a design thing,” she said. “I didn’t know how it worked.”
I’ve been seeing more dual-flush toilets lately (and toilets have been much in the news this past month, what with the Gates Foundation initiative to improve sanitation in the developing world), but little in the way of signage, explanation, or rationale. Even the dual-flush toilets, in the Natural Resource Defense Council’s LEED-Platinum-certified New York City offices, lack flushing instructions. Not a problem for staff, inculcated in the flushing folkways, but visitors?
The maitre d’ agreed that a sign would be a good idea, then Peter and I dived back into the downpour. By the time we got home, a record 7.8 inches of rain had fallen in the last twenty-four hours, causing localized flooding and, of course, unmeasured millions of gallons of untreated sewage to be discharged into city waterways. I had been looking forward to a hot shower. Now I realized it would have to wait.
Elizabeth Royte is the author of "Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It"; "Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash"; and "The Tapir's Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest". Her writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper's, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications.
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After two and a half years of steady pressure from the 
I recently watched an online documentary that filled me with solid-waste envy. 
A new 
Elizabeth Royte is the author of "Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It"; "Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash"; and "The Tapir's Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest". Her writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper's, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications.
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