If it's yellow, let it mellow?

Recently, I was sitting at one of the neighborhood watering holes when, unwittingly, I was left with questions that I thought would be great to address in this blog, and on campus.

So what was the topic that finally led me to post on this site?  Toilets of the world, of course.

My drinking companion had recently studied in Prague for a semester and I had spent the summer in Spain.   After returning from the restroom, I remarked how suprised I was that the urinal required an entire gallon of water per flush.  My friend quickly replied that he too believed it was absurd that it required that much H2O to dispose with what couldn't amount to more than a few ounces of kidney-filtered Guinness.  In Enviro-conscious Europe, we both had experienced restroom culture shock, of a sort.  We had both travelled around the continent a bit, and noticed that the amount of water used there was minimal.  To the best of our judgements, the Euro-toilet relied much more greatly on suction and maybe a pint of agua (as they called it in Spain). 

As the night sped on and our enthusiasm for toilet-talk progressed, I began to feverishly Google-search on my cell phone to find out how much water I used a day.  It turns out that human beings urinate about 5 or 6 times a day.  It also turns out that seated toilets (as opposed to urinals) use about 1.7 gallons per flush.  Ay. Dios. Mio.

This got me thinking about Occidental College and the toilets on campus here.  I was told that the student body that lives in dorms numbers at about 1400 students.  I factored in the numbers I knew: that women mostly (although I have no documentation to prove this) use seated toilets and that men mostly use urinals, that women represent about 60% of the student body, and that humans average 5.5 urinations a day.  The figures (I think) would be enough to amaze even the un-inebriated.  Using these numbers, on average the on-campus student body ALONE uses over 2200 gallons of water each day just to flush urine. It's important to note that these numbers in no way take into account the water used by off-campus students, faculty, administration, and staff.

These kind of numbers at a small institution like Oxy suprised me. I understand the arguments against the "if its yellow, let it mellow" idea; however, the idea seems more appealing when the wastefulness is really calculated on a large scale.

But, maybe there is a different approach to saving water and saving dollars at Oxy.  It seems sensible (especially in an arid area like Los Angeles) that Oxy might heed to the precedence set in Europe and explore the options of minimal-water usage toilets.