Innovate on DontFlush.Me

It is ridiculous that NYC still has 8 gallon flush toilets, both on gallons of  drinking water use and volumes of diluted sewage requiring treatment.

So, I’m proposing a ?simple? innovation topic to act as an example group innovation build upon Leif Percifield and Liz Barry’s Don’t Flush Me project.  So please comment and I’ll manually include your comments into this post.

PROPOSAL:  UPGRADING (NYC) TOILET WATER USE EFFICIENCY.

PROBLEM:   27 billion gallons of raw sewage is dumped into NYC water ways every year due to storm events overloading sewage treatment centers. [LP]

Fact – 70% of NYC sewage treatment combines storm water with industrial and domestic sewage. [LP]

Fact – the 14 NYC sewage treatment plants can handle 2x normal day load.  Rain and storm events often exceed the twice normal loading. [LP]

Fact – when NYC receives 1/10 inch in an hour or 4/10 inch in 24 hours, many of the treatment plants are over capacity and untreated sewage is dumped thru 460 Combined Sewage Outflows directly into  the harbor (CSOs are emergency release pipes located below the water line and when the treatment system gets overloaded, monitors open the gate and raw sewage is dumped directly into NYC’s harbor). [LP]

“Fact” – Some NYC toilets use as much as 8 gallons per flush. [LP]

Fact - My toilet uses 1.6 gallons per flush. [JW]

“Fact” – The average NYC flush uses 5 gallons. [LP] Concern –  I’m surprised at the AVERAGE of 5 gal/flush in NYC. [ML]

“Fact” – Most NYC water (in) and sewage (out) is paid for by landlords. [JW]

PROPOSAL – create 3 documents that give an estimate of cost/benefit for retrofitting NYC apt buildings for installing lower water-use toilets.

Brainstorm a cost analysis:

1. money paid for 1.5, 3, 5, and 8 gallon toilets
2. money paid for water in and sewage out 
3. money paid for labor to change out toilets
4. in 30-unit, 50-unit and 200-unit apartment building (prewar, +/-6 stories)

Potential User: Designed for  tenants (and/or landlords) who want to reduce the cost of rent, reduce the untreated sewage released into NYC waterways, and conserve fresh drinking water use in their building.

GOAL:  Active tenants can choose the appropriate assessment for the toilet type, building composition, etc and present a ready-made cost/benefit argument to their landlord for replacing 5 or more gallon toilets simply on sewage and water use pricing. 

Plumbing Question- Does a 1.5 gallon toilet require different pipes or pumps to achieve a certain flush pressure? ANSWER:  there is no difference in terms of installation between 5 (or 3.5) and 1.6 gallon toilets–it’s the tank size, not the waste pipe size. [ML]

Energy Question- How much energy does one save by pumping 1.5 gallons of water up 1 floor as opposed to pumping 8 gallons of water per floor? ANSWER: unless they are taller than 6 stories (I think), buildings do not pump water up to any floors but instead rely on city water pressure. Therefore, calculating the cost of pumping certain amounts of water up certain numbers of floors depends on how many total floors there are and who’s paying for it. [ML]

Cost Question – How much does one (a home owner, a landlord, and NYC govt )pay per gallon of clean water? ANSWER: The cost of clean/tap water is $3.17 per one hundred cu.ft. (1 cu.ft = ±7.48gal) as of July 2011: But, the minimum charge for service is $0.43 per day per water meter within a Bill Period. So for very small buildings, this might factor in). [ML]

ALSO there is a flat fees per toilet: Ultra low flow toilet, as approved by the Commissioner is $30.40; All other fixtures are $66.52.  So the building saves $30/year/toilet if they go to UTLRA low flow (don’t know if that’s 1.6 gal or not).[ML]

Cost Question - How much does does a homeowner, a landlord, and NYC govt pay for a gallon (cubic foot?) of waste removal?  ANSWER: To calculate the waste water rates, see this:”The wastewater charge for any property supplied with water from the Water Supply System is … 159%…of the charges for water supplied to that property from the system, including any surcharges, unless otherwise provided in this Rate Schedule.” So use the clean water supply cost and multiply by 1.59. [ML]

Labor Question - What kind of contractors, laborers would we need to hire, for an average installation (hours) and estimate of appropriate NYC hourly rates?

Building Type Question – What should we use to make 3 scenarios for a tenant to use as a rough estimate to landlord? (building age, number of units (bathrooms), number of floors (energy), 1.5, 3, 5 and 8 gallons)?

Jeni in Black, Leif in Grey, Meret in Orange, Coburn in blue

Concern – I seem to remember a recent news article about a minimum amount of water being needed to keep the solids moving in the system and low flow toilets were aggravating the situation.  Assuming my recollection is correct, placing high waste water commercial users at the start of each line would be a good fix. [CW]

Tangential Point - Permeable surface parking lots help also [ML]  

Tangential Point - Are grey water systems legal in tenant-occupied buildings?[ML]

Reduce

In January 2010, I made 2^5 (or 32) sets of my grandma’s molasses cookies spelling the word “REDUCE” for an exhibit at 18 Rabbit Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  The pun of this project is in the command: REDUCE. It is eaten and it is itself reduced. It plays with viewer participation: does the viewer A) not consume the cookie so as to reduce his/her personal consumption, or B) consume the cookie and reduce the cookies available for others. As the cookies disappear, entropy takes over and the pattern REDUCE becomes an incomprehensible landscape of characters transformed from its original meaning. Both the non consuming viewer and the consuming viewer are tied together in the entrophic landscape. One leaving resources for another to partake. The other eating away at the cliche and in so doing, is fueled to share new observations of the world, to tell the time of now – generating living phrases to effect a meaningful environmental action in the current context. Both the consumer and the non consumer influence each other by their ‘action’ or ‘inaction’ in a shared commons. Together, they transform their surroundings and their understanding by their agency.

Squander of Conservative

I was born in 1973.  I vaguely remember something about fuel prices and a hostage crisis, but more notably how jellybeans could help stop cigarette smoking.  My brain didn’t really begin to formulate a sense of politics until 1979 as my parents talked about Reagan and Carter.  My political coming of age was during what my father, a lifelong Republican, despairingly called Reaganomics.  I grew to dislike Reagan, not because I was paying attention to who he was or what he was doing, but because he was the only thing I ever heard about.  Reagan poisoned my potatoes. I felt my dad progressively become more and more politically disempowered and disoriented.  My father was a life-long union member weathering though its upper administration corruption.  He was a dogmatic ‘buy-American’ consumer despite the better gas-mileage of Japanese cars and lemon status of his patriotically purchased Dodge Aries K-car that added to his big-business-bailout/corruption name-calling, like Lee-I-A-Coconut.  And more personally, he was my Turn-Off-The-Damn-Light-When-You-Are-Finished-Using-It mentor.

I grew up in rural NH – the Live Free or Die State.  1400 people in my hometown.  Probably more cows than people and certainly less people than may live in one NYC block – my current home.  I drank warm, unpasteurized, and unhomogenized milk from a classmates family farm.  We would fill up those glass bottles at a big stainless tank and close them with the paper stoppers while the cows named Daisy and Moe moo’d contently.   I grew up with homemade bread and cookies my mother baked and a wood stove that burned 7 cords of wood my brothers and father chopped to keep us warm.  In high school, I was very aware that it made my clothes smell of smoke, always.  My parents did all kinds of things that I didn’t really understand until much later.  In 1976, they helped convert an open dump into NH’s first volunteer Recycling Center.  The wood of the new building was treated with waste car oil and still gathers the towns newspapers and continues to host the industry of paper hornets.  That is when I began to learn the curious differences between materials — how to separate tin from aluminum because the tin recycling bin had a magnet hanging over it.  That is also when I began to enjoy the great pleasure of throwing glass bottles (to compact the glass volume in a 50-gallon drum of course, not just to vent my frustrations of adolescence) on the Saturday’s our family was responsible for stewarding the community recycling agenda.  The recycling committee that met on the second Tuesday of the month (that took precedent over my not-sweet-16 birthday) coined or capitalized on the jingoistic phrase:  “Recycling makes cent$”.

My point is, it wasn’t until my early 20′s when I was a budding environmentalist that I realized that my parents weren’t ‘environmentalists’ per se.  My parents were conservatives — old school conservatives, people whose value system was to conserve resources so as to conserve money.  Perhaps another tautology, but to me I had become an environmentalist:  one that conserved resources for environmental reasons.  Regardless of our personal rationales for conserving, when we conserve individually we also conserve our shared natural resources.  Conserving one’s usage is intrinsically civic; one leaves resources for another to access.  There is no tragedy in the commons.  So while I saw images of Sally Struthers holding emaciated children from Ethiopia, the U.S. deficit exponentially grew and grew during Reagan’s time.  Reaganomics was so contentious in my family because it was when resource conservation flew out the window.  Today, to my mind, all the right-wing “Conservatives” have any more is some kind of wacked-out moral conservatism that has morphed into the extreme of the Tea Partiers and the Religious Right and both are seemingly oblivious to growing strength of the Corporatocracy.  The political party identified as “Conservative” today, doesn’t resemble the definition of conservative as I learned it from my family. I’m going to conclude this post with the etymology and definitions of the words — conserve, conservative, and conservation — so that perhaps those that wish, can begin to take back the word. In the meantime, a quiet nod to all those old-school conservatives that hold my heart steady.  Politics feel far from leadership these days.  May the root of the word, conserve, bring Democrats and Republicans back to center of our material world.  The Laws of Thermodynamics don’t have a political agenda and entropy doesn’t care whose side you are on.

Etymology of Conserve:

late 14c., from O.Fr. conserver (9c.), from L. conservare “to keep, preserve, keep intact, guard,” from com-, intensive prefix , + servare “keep watch, maintain”. Related: Conserved; conserving. As a noun (often conserves) from late 14c.

Conserve:

Conservative: