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Crap and Trade
Why public toilets should pay you.
By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, July 9, 2008, at 8:30 AM ET
What? You've been giving away your urine for free?
All these years, you've been sitting there like an idiot—or standing, or
squatting, or whatever it is you do—pissing away a perfectly good liquid
asset. Turns out, you could have sold it.
Many of us haven't just been giving our waste away; we've been paying to
unload it. Hundreds of cities have automated public toilets, known as
APTs. In New York or Los Angeles, you drop in a quarter, and the door
opens. But your quarter hardly pays the bills. New York's new APTs
reportedly cost more than $100,000
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/nyregion/11toilet.html> apiece; Los
Angeles' cost $300,000
<http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/03/local/me-toilet3> ; Seattle
installed five at a cost of $6.6 million
<http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/09/nation/na-toilets9> . At 25
cents a flush, 20 to 130 times
<http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/03/local/me-toilet3> a day, a
toilet brings in only $2,000 to $11,000 per year.
So how does the math work out? The Los Angeles Times explains
<http://articles.latimes.com/2007/may/03/local/me-toilet3> :
In Los Angeles, the facilities are part of a 20-year contract
between the city and a joint venture of two companies: CBS Outdoor and
JCDecaux. The latter, a French firm, has installed thousands of the
sleek units worldwide, mostly in exchange for the right to sell the ads
that adorn them. It's a common model that is used by the majority of
American cities looking to install the loos. L.A. is guaranteed $150
million in revenue over the course of the contract. … The companies foot
the bill for installing all the structures, including the toilets, and
for the maintenance on each.
So the company pays the city, and in exchange, the city provides
eyeballs. The eyeballs are yours. Do you get a cut? A free flush, at
least? Nope. You pay.
The obvious argument for making you pay is that you're getting a
service, too: a clean, private place to relieve yourself. If you can't
find a john, you'll have to go in the street. But why is this your
problem? Why isn't it the city's problem?
To American ears, the question sounds flippant. But look at what's
happening in India. Last fall, New Delhi hosted the World Toilet Summit
<http://www.worldtoiletsummit2007.org/> . At the meeting, experts
estimated that 700 million Indians lacked access to proper toilets.
"Defecating in the open can contaminate water supplies and spread
diseases such as diarrhea," Reuters observed
<http://www.reuters.com/article/healthNews/idUSDEL17459720071101> .
Accordingly, India committed to increase its spending on rural
sanitation by almost half, "building toilets for hundreds of millions of
its poor and homeless." The country's minister of rural development
pledged, "By 2012, India will be free of defecation in the open."
To lure people into the newly built toilets, one Indian locality has
come up with a creative idea. On Sunday, the Times of India reported
<http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/It_pays_to_pee_you_get_a_fee/rssarti
cleshow/3201740.cms> :
Residents of Saliyar Street in Musiri … are getting paid for
using toilets. While people elsewhere have to hastily dig into their
pockets and shell out a rupee or more to relieve themselves in a dingy
public urinal, around 300 families in Musiri have found they can
actually profit every time they answer nature's call. Essentially, the
system serves two purposes. While it encourages people in the lower
middle-class neighbourhood to use toilets, the urine collected goes for
research to test its efficacy as a fertiliser.
The plan seems to be working:
Initially people in Saliyar street were amused when they heard
about the use and earn facility. But now the queues are getting longer
before the eco sanitation (ecosan) toilet. … Although it was the novelty
of the project that initially attracted many, people have also realized
the health benefits and stopped using public spaces to relieve
themselves. ''Now even children in the locality do not urinate in the
open, thanks to the 10 paise incentive," said [a local man].
Could a similar incentive work in the United States? It already does, in
a way. Nobody's being paid to use public toilets, as far as I know. But
some people get to use them for free. In Los Angeles, for example, the
Times reports
<http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/09/nation/na-toilets9> , "All of
the APTs in the city, except two on skid row, charge a quarter for each
use." Why the skid-row exception? Two reasons seem pretty clear. First,
homeless people don't spend quarters lightly, if they have them at all.
Second, if the city doesn't give them a free indoor place to relieve
themselves, they'll use a free outdoor place: the street.
You can't exactly sell a lot of advertising around a john for homeless
people. That means no company can make money off such a toilet. The
toilet's existence, therefore, implies that the city is willing to pay a
significant subsidy to dissuade those people from soiling public space.
Why don't you get subsidized the same way? Because you're no threat. You
don't foul sidewalks. If you have to choose between peeing in private
for 25 cents and peeing in public for free, you'll cough up the quarter.
This might be the only environmental issue where wealthier people
pollute less than poor people do.
>From an egalitarian standpoint, reverse toilet discrimination makes
sense. It's a means test: from each according to ability; to each
according to need. But from an environmental standpoint, it's crazy. A
central and well-justified principle of environmental law is that the
polluter pays <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polluter_pays_principle> .
In this case, it's the nonpolluter who pays. The polluter—the person who
pees in the street—pays nothing.
When you look at it this way, as India does, the logical conclusion is
that public toilets, at a minimum, should be free. If some people want
to sit in first class, fine. Charge them a fee to use fancier johns. But
no city should treat those space-age, self-cleaning units
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/nyregion/11toilet.html> as its
public toilets. There has to be a widely available option to sit in
coach for free.
Or we could try our own version of the Indian experiment. To do that,
we'd need to devise an efficient method of converting public-toilet
waste into something productive, such as fertilizer, without endangering
public health. Before you laugh off this idea, go find out whether your
city is already recycling sewage into drinking water
<http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-me-lawater15-2008may
15,0,7022878.story> .
Or we could go the other way, like Zanzibar, and prosecute
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_kmafp/is_200605/ai_n16379057>
people who relieve themselves outdoors. That's another way the polluter
can pay.
I bet somebody will figure out pretty soon how to monetize toilet waste.
And it won't be the government; it'll be the private sector. Did you see
the New York Times story a few weeks back about restaurant grease? It's
being illegally siphoned
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/us/30grease.html> from filthy bins
and barrels. Bandits are selling it for conversion to biodiesel. When
bandits start siphoning public toilets, maybe governments will wake up
and get in on the action. And you'll stop having to pay.
William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing
Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War
<http://www.bearingright.com/> .
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2195071/
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
