If Harvard’s talking about it… why not Champlain?

April 1, 2013

You’re in for an exciting time whenever Sylvester “Sloof” Lirpa ’75 comes to town for a visit.  Sloof has come up with a new invention he wants to pilot at our school, and I think it may be inappropriate.   Sloof wants to install porta-potties that recycle urine into drinking water.  Do you think people would actually drink this water?  The first pilot unit is getting installed here today for the construction workers at the future Cissi Hall.

The “Potty Fountain” looks like a conventional portable commode, but has solar panels on the roof, an in-vessel digestor for solid wastes and south-facing condenser channels.  Liquids recovered through the urinal and the collector in the front part of the “hopper” are pumped up to the sunlit condenser channels, which distill the urine into clean water.  A niche on the east side contains a push-button spigot which delivers 250 ml of chilled drinking water. In keeping with the campus’s waste reduction goals, users must provide their own reusable container.  An in-vessel digestor uses the Potty’s solid waste to make methane, which powers fuel cells running the pumps and chiller built into the PF.  On a sunny day, Sloof claims that his PF can service 1,000 visitors and dispense as many servings of water.  This could create a new competition for next year’s RecycleMania Tournament: Targeted Material “P,” right after Material N: E-Waste and Material O: Plastic Film. With an average contribution of 200 ml of liquid waste, a  busy PF could recycle 200 kg of liquid waste into drinking water, all without any plastic bottles.

Several engineering students have signed up to monitor the PF’s and one of them, D. Avrile Poisson SEAS ’16 has even brewed a hot coffee-like beverage from the digestor’s residual biochar.  The recycled caffeine content of this “coffee” exceeds 250 mg per serving.  Avrile’s study group routinely drinks it while solving problem sets.  This creates the prospect of a recycling Potty Cafe, dispensing not only water, but also a hot coffee-like drink.

So what do you think?  It seems to me that the “yuck” factor is a little too high.  Would a pecycling Potty Fountain, or even a Potty Cafe, work on your campus?  The answer at ours is yes, according to Poisson, D. Avrile and Sloof Lirpa.

–Rob Gogan
Harvard Recycling & Waste Services

PS. April Fool’s!