Posts by Phlush
Enacting Awareness: Water, Waste, and Public Space
With last Friday’s whimsical 5K walk, activists at the University of California at Santa Cruz focused attention on often-evaded issues. “Slugs to Sludge” was created as a playful way to raise awareness of sewage infrastructure and the water it requires, and to advocate for action on ecological sanitation at UCSC and beyond. With the average…
Read MoreGlobal Homeless Day: Toilet Solutions from France for the USA
“The restroom thus becomes a tool for figuring out just how a society functions – what it values, how it separates people from one another, and the kinds of trade-offs that come to be made,” says sociologist Harvey Moltoch. While we at PHLUSH believe in safe and accessible toilets for all people (families, children, those…
Read MoreStaying human through hygiene while houseless
Living houseless in an urban environment requires personal savvy and logistic skill. Days are often an endless series of searches, lines, and waits: finding the next meal, a safe place to sleep, a public restroom. Here at PHLUSH, we see toilet availability as a human right and advocate for building urban public restrooms that serve…
Read MorePoo to Peaches – Educating the Next Generation of Composting Toilet Users
Guest post by Stephen Thomas of Watershed Management Group. Every day, the average person flushes 10 gallons of clean drinking water down the toilet. This constitutes a waste of two precious resources: scarce water supplies and human manure, which could instead be composted to form a fertile soil amendment. While there are various commercial composting…
Read MoreWorld Toilet Day 2014 Recap
World Toilet Day on November 19 brought such a deluge of articles, new reports, infographics, and videos that it’s taken us until now to work through them. International media outlets, when compared to those in the United States, often better convey dynamic technicalities of sanitation systems on multiple scales. But after a review of many…
Read MoreCelebrating a Gender-Inclusive World Toilet Day
World Toilet Day is now officially celebrated by the United Nations every year on November 19th to bring attention to the 2.5 billion of our fellow humans who lack access to clean safe toilets. In the United States, clean, comfortable restrooms are a common expectation whether we are at work, home, a coffee shop, or even at a…
Read MoreBack to School: Free Course in Sanitation Systems & Technologies
Providing toilets to 2.4 billion of our fellow humans without them and building sanitary infrastructure that controls the spread of Ebola and other contagious killers calls for widespread training. Starting October 13, 2014, Eawag, (the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology), in collaboration with EPFL (the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), is offering a free online course Design and…
Read MoreLet’s Legalize Composting & UD toilets in US
Our friends at Recode have drafted model code for composting toilets with urine diversion (UD) and IAMPO is preparing to vote on it. This Portland-based group of scientists and policy advocates have made spectacular progress. Now Recode is calling on us to help make history. Please consider a tax-deductible donation to enable Recode’s Director to travel to California to address IAMPO officials. Details are in…
Read MoreGottaGo! campaigning for public toilets in Ottawa
This guest blog post is from Joan Kuyek of GottaGo!. The GottaGo! campaign in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, is advocating for a network of open clean, accessible public toilets and water fountains in key places in the region. Currently, the only public toilets in Ottawa are in recreation centres, libraries and large parks. When the programming…
Read MoreDo you Poop Sustainably? Alternative Toilets Save Water & ReCycle Waste
This guest blog post is from Atara Jaffe. Sustainability. From mainstream media to blogs, sustainability is not just a buzzword, but is frequently used as a term to embody practices related to survival. Everyone from homeowners to architects are incorporating “sustainability” tactics to slowly transform the way people think and live. While solar panels have popped…
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