A Florida school has learned a hard lesson about green technology and green math.
The plan was to save water, and the planet, by installing waterless urinals in the boys washrooms. Each green urinal would save the school $100 per year in water utility bills.
But things went wrong. Horribly wrong:
Students at a high school in Boca Raton, Florida, must step over rivers of urine and endure the stench of rancid waste after a plan to bring ‘green’ waterless urinals into bathrooms backfired. School officials at Spanish River High School thought they had found an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving solution for their bathrooms when they installed Falcon Waterfree urinals in their boys bathrooms.
But with no water moving through the school’s copper pipes to flush the urine into the sewer system, the waste produced noxious gases that ate through the metal, leaving leaky pipes that allowed urine to drip into walls and flow onto floors.
‘It was pretty disgusting,’ school board chairman Frank Barbieri told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. ‘The girls had to step over a river of urine. I could smell it as soon as I walked into the hallway.’
via Green pee « The Daily Bayonet.
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And the Greens tell us they fully understand the chemistry of ocean acidification? Right.
It’s Pee Cee gawn mad!
Oh good lord. Think of the children!
Didn’t anybody ask themselves why urinals have water in the first place?
Hindsight is 20/20, but that one (the lack of flushing) would seem to be more a PPPmPPP. (no pun intended).
I have two anachronistic 3 gallon flushers and one ‘green’ 1.7 litre flusher. One wild guess which one always needs multiple flushes and is also the only one that ever requires a plunger to clear. This madness must be stopped before we become the civilization responsible for a ‘Green Plague’ in future history books.
d(^_^)b
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
I suppose this wouldn’t have happend with ABS piping?
Waterless urinals? Why didn’t they just install an out house?
Our entire sewage system is designed to work with a large amount of water with the waste. Flushing sewer systems is gonna become a regular occurance with reduced water flows. Its hard to upgrade hundreds of trillions of dollars of infrastructure after the fact, so we are stuck with it.
This doesn’t seem to be a failure on the part of the the urinals, but rather a failure on the part of the contractor who installed them to install to manufacturer specifications.
My first question would be, why the heck do they have copper sewage pipes. Why aren’t they PVC, or clay in the case of an outdated installation.
With proper materials and proper use, there is no reason the waterless urinals wouldn’t have worked as planned and would have indeed saved the school money in the long run. The mistake was NOT with using a “green” technology. The mistake was with not using proper materials for installation.
An automobile is a fantastic piece of machinery, but if you put solid steel wheels on instead of rubber tires, success is not something you are going to achieve.
I know that there are many “green” technologies that are utterly ridiculous and more wasteful than their traditional counterparts, but I for one don’t think that a reduction in water usage is a BAD thing to strive for.
Another classic example of the well intended but misguided.
By the way, I thought sewage drain lines were supposed to be ABS, not copper!
I hate the association of ‘green’ to anything outside of CAGW. Saving potable water in FL is generally a good thing to do and has been an ongoing effort for longer than CAGW and therefore doesn’t deserve the pox of the ‘green’ label IMO.
It would be my guess that the urinals were installed by an illiterate person. The instructions plainly say to NOT use with copper drain pipes because of corrosion.
Hello Boca Raton – SUE THE INSTALLER!
Actually, the waterless urinals work really well, the problem was copper(!?) drain pipes. Most drains are cast iron or PVC, so it’s not a problem for them. It also sounds like the vent system for the plumbing was poorly designed as those gases should have vented to atmosphere in a controlled manner rather than eating through the pipes. The urinals aren’t the problem, it’s the rest of the plumbing…
Is the stench due to water-free urinals or is it actually a result of the quality of education kids receive nowadays?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115×239700
It would appear that if you can’t kill the kids with pee, try and get a windmill to fall on them as they did in Ohio.
Reblogged this on The Blogspaper.
This is the second time I’ve read about waterless urinals failing because the plumbing was copper. But the first time was years ago in Los Angeles. Didn’t the people who sold/installed these things think to ask about the plumbing.
If there is no flushing, how can it do anything but stink?
Sensational bit of education for those kids that money couldn’t buy.
My daughter’s future mother-in-law lives the “Good Life” somewhere in the outer Hebrides and has two toilets, one for a number one and one for a number two, niether of which uses any water at all.
What will she think of me at the wedding breakfast when she discovers that I am a WUWT blogging, uber consumarist, resource profligate “denialist” capitalist bastard. This is what comes of reading the gospel according to James Delingpole.
I suspect that the drain pipes were originally copper/metal and that ripping up floors and pulling down walls to replace them wasn’t in the budget nor possible within the schedule.
“Each green urinal would save the school $100 per year in water utility bills.”
I think vouchers – which allow students leave the public schools and go where they can succeed – would be a safer, more humane route for saving money on urinals in public schools. Free the students, then they would be happy not to flush your stupid urinals.
I have to agree with the others. Although I find that flushless urinals are foolish (low-flush are much cheaper and easier to maintain for nearly the same benefit), this is a problem of a blind idiot who didn’t install things properly.
I work in a LEED-certified building on a military installation that uses these waterless urinals. They are extremely picky and tend to clog easily. Even spitting in them will mess them up. I can’t imagine them being successfully used in a building with school-age boys, regardless of proper drain plumbing.
may I suggest a solution:http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/53020/53020,1179096403,15/stock-photo-outdoor-toilets-in-a-park-near-vancouver-3291116.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-3291116/stock-photo-outdoor-toilets-in-a-park-near-vancouver.html&h=321&w=450&sz=93&tbnid=UHgZCYty5tIl0M:&tbnh=90&tbnw=126&prev=/search%3Fq%3DOut%2Bdoor%2Btoilets%26tbm%3Disch%26tbo%3Du&zoom=1&q=Out+door+toilets&docid=lAFD1qMc0sunAM&sa=X&ei=m_ovT-CiFrHKiQL88rSuCg&ved=0CLcBEPUBMAw&dur=3854
There’s a similar problem with “low flow” toilets. The solid material gets stuck in the pipes because there is not enough water to wash the waste down the pipe.