This article was taken from the August issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
In a laboratory 15km east of downtown Los Angeles, a mechanical penis sputters to life. A technician starts a timer as a stream of water erupts from the apparatus’s brass tip, arcing into a urinal mounted exactly 30cm away. James Krug smiles. His latest back-splatter experiment is under way.
Krug is an unusual entrepreneur. Twenty years ago, he was a rising star in the film and television business. He served as a vice president of the Disney Channel in the 80s and ran a distribution company with members of the Disney family in the 90s. But 11 years ago Krug became convinced that the world did not need another TV show. What it needed was a better urinal.
His transformation from Hollywood player to urinal evangelist began in 1999 at the Universal Studios Hilton in LA. A business acquaintance knew that he was interested in exploring new opportunities and arranged a meeting with Ditmar Gorges, a German engineer who fervently believed that flushing a urinal was a waste of water. Sitting in the Hilton lobby, Gorges gushed potty talk. He explained that he had invented a water-free urinal and pointed out that urine was already liquid -- and a generally sterile liquid at that. Gravity could drain it completely. No flush necessary.
Krug immediately grasped the implications: the German’s humble innovation had the potential to save millions of litres of water at a time when demand was draining aquifers dry. It would do more than any TV show to solve a pressing problem. Krug decided to help.
Drawing on sales skills he’d honed at the Cannes Film Festival, Krug dived into the toilet business. He formed Falcon Waterfree Technologies with Gorges and explained to anyone who would listen that the water-free urinal would save more than just water: in California, a fifth of the electrical output was used by processing and pumping water. Cutting water usage would reduce the state’s carbon footprint.
Falcon wasn’t the first to develop a waterless urinal. A company near San Diego had been struggling to sell them since 1991. But Krug made a conceptual breakthrough: the real profits wouldn’t come from the urinals themselves. They’d come from selling the replaceable cartridges that sat in each of the waterless receptacles.
In a traditional urinal, water sits in the drain, preventing sewer gases from escaping. Gorges’s used a cartridge filled with a liquid sealant. Urine could pass through but sewer gases remained trapped beneath the sealant -- no water needed. The $40 cartridge had to be replaced after 7,000 uses, turning a one-time urinal sale into a perpetual income stream. Krug’s business model took a page out of the Gillette playbook: keep the unit cost low and lock customers in to buying the cartridges.
He quickly won converts. Cable tycoon Marc Nathanson invested in early 2000, and in 2001 Falcon began to manufacture its urinal, dubbed the U1P. Soon Al Gore signed on as an adviser and in 2006 Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay, made a significant investment. Krug was sure the world was ready for a better bowl -- there hadn’t been any major advances in urinal technology for decades -- but there was something he wasn’t prepared for: the plumbers. Mike Massey didn’t like Krug’s urinal. As head of Pipe, a plumbing union advocacy group in southern California, Massey looks out for plumbers’ interests. And as far as he was concerned, the waterless urinal was a threat to public health. Diseases might fester because the urinals weren’t being washed down with every use. Sewer gases might leak through the cartridge. “People take plumbing for granted,” Massey says. “But the reality is that plumbers protect the health of the nation. That’s how we think of our job.”
Plumbing codes never contemplated a urinal without water. As a result, Falcon’s fixtures couldn’t be installed legally in most parts of the US. Krug assumed it would be simple to amend the model codes on which most state and city codes are based, but Massey and other plumbers began to argue vehemently against it. The reason the urinal hadn’t changed in decades was because it worked, they argued. Urine could be dangerous, Massey said, and the urinal was not something to trifle with. As a result, in 2003 the organisations that administer the two dominant model codes in the US rejected Falcon’s request to permit installation of waterless urinals. “The plumbers blindsided us,” Krug says. “We didn’t understand what we were up against.”
Krug scrambled to counter the plumbers’ public-health claims. He hired Charles Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona. Gerba studies “filth, pestilence and disease” with an emphasis on the bathroom, and says he has done more field studies on the toilet than anyone else in academia. From his point of view, there was a clear explanation for the plumbers’ resistance: it drained their wallets.“ Plumbers don’t like the waterless urinal because it cuts down on their work tremendously,” he says. “There’s no more piping to install, and... no moving parts to repair.”
To test the plumbers’ assertions, Gerba compared a traditional flush urinal with the Falcon waterless. He found that the Falcon urinal presented a less hospitable environment for germs than constantly moistened conventional bowls. The process of flushing could actually eject those germs into the air. “If it’s a traditional urinal, you should flush and run,” Gerba says.
The plumbers reject the contention that their opposition was an attempt to protect their livelihoods. “We just weren’t so sure this was a good product,” Massey says. “People think we’re a bunch of dumb plumbers, but we’re actually quite sophisticated.” To buttress their health claims, plumbing unions in California hired Phyllis Fox, an environmental engineer and water-quality specialist. She didn’t perform any tests, but by examining the designs of the Falcon and other waterless urinals, she concluded that hydrogen sulphide gases in the sewer lines could escape when the cartridges were replaced, resulting in “unconsciousness, respiratory paralysis and death”. In other words, the waterless urinal could kill.
Krug was forced to alter his strategy. With the path to rewriting the model codes blocked, he began to wage a city-by-city assault. He hired Daniel Gleiberman, a governmental- affairs specialist, to convince local authorities that Falcon’s urinals were safe. Gleiberman began to win exceptions across the US. The American military agreed to test the urinals at Fort Huachucha, a base in water-strapped southern Arizona. Craig Hansen, the base’s energy-engineering technician, decided to retrofit all 740 of his urinals over the objection of local plumbers. “The plumbers felt that these things were a threat to their livelihood,” Hansen says. “They don’t like change.”
The flushless urinals cut water consumption dramatically at the base. Hansen figures he saves millions of gallons of water, offsetting the cost of the cartridges. The US Army Corp of Engineers took notice and mandated in 2006 that the Army install only waterless urinals from 2010 onwards.
From the start, the plumbers came out fighting. When the Los Angeles City Council met to consider approval of waterless urinals in 2003, Massey and others showed up to protest. One even donned germ-fighting gloves and a face mask. In light of this opposition, the council rejected the proposal.
Massey didn’t let up. He hired a lobbyist, and unions across the country organised against the urinals. In 2006, Plumbers Union Local 690 in Philadelphia and other plumbing and contractors’ associations took out a full-page ad in the Northeast Times headlined, “Waterless urinals -- setting the record straight”. The ad cited Phyllis Fox’s research and concluded, “This is not a union issue… waterless urinals are a threat to the health of this nation.” That same year, the organisation that oversees the US’s Uniform Plumbing Code, one of the two dominant model codes, again rejected Falcon’s proposed amendments.
Still, Krug and Gleiberman did make progress. The other dominant set of regulations -- the International Plumbing Code -- accepted waterless urinals in 2006.The IPC serves as a template for about half the US, largely in the east, as well as a large number of other countries, and Gleiberman says it’s less influenced by the unions. With IPC approval, Krug was finally able to start marketing his product broadly.
Massey knew that Falcon was a formidable opponent. He had researched the company’s directors and learned that lead investor Marc Nathanson was a well connected Democrat, a friend of Bill Clinton’s and a billionaire. “Not a guy to pick a fight with,” Massey says. He also knew Al Gore was on the board of advisers, putting Massey in the unusual position of squaring off against traditional Democrat allies.
Massey was beginning to see the writing on the wall. Opposition to the waterless urinal was making plumbers look out of step. They were being painted as anti environmental at a time when builders increasingly wanted to go green. Massey concluded that he was on the wrong side of the argument. By the end of 2006, he decided to support the urinal’s inclusion in the Uniform Plumbing Code. But there was a catch. When the code change was finally approved in 2009, it stated that water had to be piped to the waterless urinals -- but the water pipe was to be capped off behind the wall and left unused. Krug thought the new code’s requirement was unnecessary, but he decided not to oppose it. He had fought for eight years and was ready to move on. “It’s the cost of doing business in the real world,” he says.
Massey argues that the condition makes sense. If a building owner decides to go back to flush urinals, he’ll blame the plumber if the water isn’t already there.
Waterless urinals have since colonised American men’s rooms -- Krug says he has sold 200,000, and a sprinkling of competitors has appeared. In the UK, where regulations are less stringent, numbers are harder to come by, but John Pidgeon, a London-based plumbing specialist, reckons that waterless units already make up “25 to 30 per cent” of all new installations. Now, after all the heated debate, it’s possible to assess how the urinals function in a variety of environments. The conclusion: without proper maintenance, there can be problems.
In July 2007, the University of Washington in Seattle decided to do a test. The school had experimented with Falcon and other no-water urinals and wanted to do a thorough study before buying more. It asked Roger van Gelder, a water-conservation consultant and proponent of the urinal technology, to do the evaluation. Van Gelder recommended installing new drain piping so the experiment could begin with a clean slate. Six months later, he opened the pipes, which had been installed in a dorm bathroom, and discovered an oily sludge was blocking the drain lines. Falcon recommends pouring a bucket of hot water into its urinals to flush out deposits before putting in a new cartridge. But van Gelder presumes the dorm’s maintenance staff didn’t follow this protocol. Van Gelder also took issue with Falcon’s cartridges. They clogged quickly -- sometimes after only 700 uses -- and had to be thrown away or recycled. And if a caretaker didn’t replace a clogged cartridge immediately, a smelly and unsightly mix of urine and blue sealant would pool in the urinal. The university ended up removing all of the waterless devices, and van Gelder is no longer a believer.
There were problems with Falcon and other waterless urinals elsewhere, too. Over the past few years, the California EPA headquarters in Sacramento ran into trouble with the no-flush urinals it had installed: the drainpipes clogged, the urinals stank and the bathrooms were messy. The units were removed in February 2010. Chicago City Hall and O’Hare International Airport have also removed their waterless urinals, citing clogged pipes.
Krug counters that the urinals are working in large-scale facilities across the US -- they’re a fixture at Rose Bowl Stadium in California, and Las Vegas Motor Speedway. They just have to be maintained properly. “It does require a little bit of retraining,” says Gaylon Holland, director of maintenance operations for the Temecula Valley Unified School District in southern California. Holland has installed 650 Falcon urinals and says he had to teach his crew how to take care of them. The effort paid off: maintenance costs have gone down, and the district is saving huge quantities of water. “Everybody was scared of them at first,” Holland says. “But they work, and they work well.”
Krug says the industry is turning a corner. With sales continuing to climb -- the total number of flushless urinals installed in the US has more than doubled since 2006 -- Krug thinks he can finally put a decade of controversy behind him and focus on exploring new ideas at his urinal laboratory. He’s particularly excited about his latest design, the F-7000,which features a patent-pending splash-reducing shape. “Nobody wants a wet leg,” he says. Krug runs his hand over the F-7000’s porcelain edges, entranced by its curves. “It’s really a beautiful urinal.”
Joshua Davis ( joshuadavis.net) wrote about the world’s biggest diamond heist in issue 06.09
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
