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.
Throwing an M-80 down one might help it purge…
That was fun in High School using a “real” toilet….
Teachers and school officials are the reasons why global warming was propelled into popularity. Ad just because it is popoular, dosen’t mean it is correct. Consider who runs the schools. Teachers and ex-teachers. Where do teachers come from?
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/Occupations.aspx
From the pen of a hero of the leftists, GB Shaw:
He who can does,
He who can’t, teaches.
and I add, he who can’t teach, becomes a school administrator.
So the refuse of our society ends up teaching our children, mostly crap, leftist crap, and those who fail at that make decisions like this.
These jerks didn’t really change the urinals to save money, they did so because of a green religious imperative, relying on the fiscal argument. Well there you go… you have teachers, accomplished at nothing, preaching green religion, based on silly fiscal reasoning, bringing the schools infrastructure to complete collapse.
Teachers, just shut up why don’t ya. You are just ruining everything.
Save $100 per year in H2O costs? How much did each waterless urinal cost including installation? Include the time value of the $$$$ for that ‘investment’.
Hey! diddle, diddle,
The greens and their piddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
So when did concentrated pee/ammonia ever get to be better ‘an diluted pee/ammonia?
There’s a story that goes something like this:
You can use your pee as fertilizers for your tomatoes.
No, says the listener, looking dumb struck, really?
A week later the listener states back: No, you can’t use pee as a fertilizer, I peed on ’em all week and all my tomatoes died!
Which ratio did y… wait what?
What ratio?
When I lived in Las Vegas, they put in restrictions on outside water use because that water could not be reclaimed. Otherwise, water that goes in the house drains (including the toilets) was recycled back into the system. I don’t know what the loss to evaporation and leaks was, but it was never discussed as being anything of significance.
On a related point, the great irony of the low flush toilets is that it often takes two flushes to do the work that used to take only one flush. Where is the water savings in that?
A nice step back into the middle ages. Not much better than relieving yourself into a chamber pot and throwing it out a window. Ready to come back to the 21st century now? And to think they were “saving” $100 per year!!!! That probably cost themselves thousands of dollars in repairs for their little green experiment. This helps prove my theory that the human species despises it’s own success.
With Florida public schools reporting spending $7,000 per student per year,* one has to ask if it really is a selling point to the taxpayers, citizens and students, that proper indoor plumbing is not to be included in that high tuition price.
*This report by policy analyst Adam B Schafer at the Cato Instiute “reveals that, on average, per-pupil spending in these areas is 44 percent higher than officially reported.” http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11432
Thinking of it a lil different. These days, when an architect designs a construction project, they pick up the written specs, and some dimensions, and begin to create a set of plans.
Or to say it better, they take limited inputs and create a model for what they want it to look like.
If they dont like it, they simply hit the erase buuton.
Because it is so easy to erase, the thinking process gets short circuited.
In the olden day, when drawings were pencil and paper, it might take 6 hours to erase and redraw what you didnt like. Because you didnt want to erase for 6 hours, you engaged the brain alot harder upfront. I personally witnessed the difference in the construction trades.
Which brings me to a bigger thought: Our dependence in computers has reduced the general cognitive ability, whether with Architecture, Politics, or Climate.
Unfortunately, we have to relearn that lesson over and over again, and its why sceptics are sceptical of computer generated solutions.
The San Jose CA airport with much fanfare installed the same urinals in the new B terminal. They were removed 6 months later.
No, the San Jose airport still has and uses waterless urinals (as of three weeks ago, anyway).
Does Algore have waterless urinals in any of his mansions? Even just one as a novelty item?
Those GREEN SCIENTISTS did not know that urine (ammonia) DISSOLVES COPPER! as tetramine copper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetramminecopper(II)_sulfate
Typical Green execution. Pay extraordinary attention to the green idealism, and absolutely no attention to the actual engineering. Now I wonder what the total costs will be? All to save $100 per year in water. Water is a cycle and cannot really be saved as it is never really used up – just recycled by nature. GK
We have no-flush toilets at the house and they don’t work just fine. Plus we have lids that don’t go down and a toilet paper dispenser that cannot be refilled (by man anyway – had to outsource it). So we’re green all the way down.
Bet it smelled like Grandma and Grandpa’s multi-generation, multi-hole outhouse.
This for a proposed saving of a mighty $100 per year? For an entire school? As for being “Green” – does the area actually suffer from water shortages? Was anyone going thirsty? Really, this smacks of nothing more than a vacuous, smug feel-good exercise (like just about all Green nonsense).
Steve from Rockwood says:
February 6, 2012 at 10:06 am
So what happens to the cat if you accidentally drop it in mid-wipe?
It’s a good idea, but it sounds like someone forgot to tell the school that the old metal sewer pipes would need upgrading to plastic pipe for the waterfree urinals.
The supposed savings from these urinals was to $100/yr but,according to the news story. they have odor filters that must be changed quarterly. Given the probable cost of the filters plus the cost of paying a unionized public employee to do the replacements I wonder what the actual cost difference really was, although they were probably saving some money on the Polish breath mints.
Since females make up the majority of the Green Movement and are often the most virulent and out of touch activists, they need to meet (and smell) the problems first hand in their own restrooms or at least do the lib thing and go coed on the restroom facilities. It’s only fair and educational too.
“In the western world today there are regularly circumstances when water supplies to urban areas run short. This is NOT because there is a shortage of water.”
My favorite example was hearing of “water shortages” while I was living in Detroit. Um, what? You’ve got two of the biggest bodies of fresh water IN THE WORLD right outside your doors; you’re not running short on water, you’re just too cheap to make it potable.
“the waste produced noxious gases that ate through the metal, leaving leaky pipes that allowed urine to drip into walls and flow onto floors.”
They just need to convert to lead pipes then. Problem solved!
Good that they have copper all over, they can sell it for a fortune when changing all the plumbing for PVC.
It is interesting to see all the recommendations to use PVC piping for the ‘green’ toilets. The refineries that are the source of the ethylene that is the basis of PVC will appreciate the business. But perhaps to be truly green these should be bamboo pipes?
One of the articles about this said it would cost $500,000 to fix it.