For centuries, the people of London and other big cities got their cooking and washing water from rivers or wells, limiting their consumption to pretty much what they could carry. They dumped their waste into brick-lined cesspits that would be emptied by the night soil men, who sold it as fertilizer or dumped it off Dung Pier into the Thames. Liquid waste might be thrown into gutters in the middle of the road.

In 1854, in the middle of a cholera epidemic in London, Dr John Snow mapped where victims died and found that the deaths seemed concentrated around one of those pumps, at 37 Broad Street. When he had the handle removed from the pump, the cholera epidemic stopped immediately. He had made the first verifiable connection between human waste and disease.



After people realised that excrement plus drinking water equals death, parliament passed the Metropolitan Water Act to “make provision for securing the supply to the metropolis of pure and wholesome water”. Public pumps were replaced with pipes delivering water directly to homes.

For centuries standing pumps were the main source of fresh water for cities. Photograph: Bridgeman Art Photograph: fhdufhdu

This was perhaps the greatest, but now undervalued, convenience. Instead of carrying water, suddenly everyone had as much as they could use, all the time, with the turn of a tap. Not surprisingly, according to Abby Rockefeller in Civilization and Sludge, the average water use per person went quickly from three gallons of water per person to 30 and perhaps as much as 100 gallons per person.

The toilet was an almost trivial addition; it had been around for a while (John Harington, a member of Elizabeth I’s privy council invented a flush toilet, but there is no evidence that she ever tried it) but was pretty useless without a water supply. But it became incredibly convenient to just to wash the poop away. Except now there was more faecal effluence than anyone knew what to do with, overflowing the cesspits and flowing into the gutters and sewers originally designed for rainwater that all led to the Thames. The result was even more cholera and disease.

The environmentalists of the day tried to stop this; they promoted earth toilets that would keep human waste separate, that would treat it as a resource. Rockefeller writes: “The engineers were divided again between those who believed in the value of human excreta to agriculture and those who did not. The believers argued in favour of 'sewage farming', the practice of irrigating neighbouring farms with municipal sewage. The second group, arguing that 'running water purifies itself' (the more current slogan among sanitary engineers: 'the solution to pollution is dilution'), argued for piping sewage into lakes, rivers, and oceans.”

But they never really had a chance to debate the issue; it was a done deal as people rushed to install convenient flush toilets. Soon every contaminated stream and gutter was being enlarged and covered over and turned into what remains today’s urban sewer system. In the Guardian, Blake Morrison described it as being “on a par, aesthetically, with the canal bridges and railway viaducts of the Victorian era". But it was really just going with the flow instead of thinking about the consequences.

The author credited with inventing the flush toilet, John Harington; a popular member of Elizabeth I's court. Photograph: Elgar Collection Photograph: Elgar Collection

Inside our houses, the architects and homeowners of the late 19th century were as confused as the engineers about what to do. People had washstands in their bedrooms, so at first they just stuck sinks and taps into them, and put the toilet into whatever closet in the hall or space under the stairs that they could find, hence the “water closet.” They quickly realised that it didn’t make a lot of sense to run plumbing to every bedroom when it was cheaper to bring it all to one place, and the idea of the bathroom was born. Since the early adopters, then as now, were the rich with a few rooms to spare, they were often lavish, with all the fixtures encased in wood like the commodes they replaced.

As germ theory became accepted at the end of the 19th century, the bathroom became a hospital room, with fixtures of porcelain and lined with tile or marble. These materials are expensive; as the bathroom became mainstream and accessible to all classes, it got smaller. The plumbers lined everything up in a row to use less pipe. By about 1910 the bathroom is pretty much indistinguishable from the ones built today.

Nobody seriously paused to think about the different functions and their needs; they just took the position that if water comes in and water goes out, it is all pretty much the same and should be in the same room. Nobody thought about how the water from a shower or bathtub (greywater) is different from the water from a toilet (blackwater); it all just went down the same drain which connected to the same sewer pipe that gathered the rainwater from the streets, and carried it away to be dumped in the river or lake.

It is hard to find something that we actually got right in the modern bathroom. The toilet is too high (our bodies were designed to squat), the sink is too low and almost useless; the shower is a deathtrap (an American dies every day from bath or shower accidents). We fill this tiny, inadequately ventilated room with toxic chemicals ranging from nail polish to tile cleaners. We flush the toilet and send bacteria into the air, with our toothbrush in a cup a few feet away. We take millions of gallons of fresh water and contaminate it with toxic chemicals, human waste, antibiotics and birth control hormones in quantities large enough to change the gender of fish.

We mix up all our bodily functions in a machine designed by engineers on the basis of the plumbing system, not human needs. The result is a toxic output of contaminated water, questionable air quality and incredible waste. We just can’t afford to do it this way any more.

What could the bathroom of the future look like?

Tamsin Oglesby’s play The War Next Door opened to mixed reviews in 2007; one critic said “the shoddy script and hammy acting left me so bored that I contemplated impaling myself on my biro". However, one prop got worldwide attention, as noted in the synopsis: “Sophie and Max are a thoroughly modern British couple, cosmopolitan, open-minded. They’ve even constructed their own eco loo (well, it does save 30 litres of water a day).”

That’s seriously open-minded, having a composting toilet in a London home. It also does a lot more than just save 30 litres of water; it eliminates blackwater (contaminated with faeces) as distinct from greywater, what comes out of our sinks, laundries and showers, which can be reused in the garden. Lots of people are doing greywater diversion and using it to flush their toilets, but that just turns it black. A composting toilet is a much more grand gesture, that people will resist; I was once told that: “No one will want this inside their house. I know this, because I still have a few teeth in my head and a few friends in town.”

Perhaps. However, if we are going to do something about the incredible waste of water that is the modern bathroom, radical changes may be required. A lot of Britons are proud of going net-zero or off-grid with their electricity and energy supply; it’s time to consider going off-pipe too. According to the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (Post): “Over 10bn litres of sewage are produced every day in England and Wales. It takes approximately 6.34 GW hours of energy to treat this volume of sewage, almost 1% of the average daily electricity consumption of England and Wales.” You’re not net-zero if you are flushing your waste into the sewer.

Composting toilets are not yet flush-and-forget like a conventional loo, but they are getting close. There are vacuum toilets that suck it all away to the composter using almost no water; there are foam flush toilets that are almost indistinguishable from conventional bowls. Companies such as Clivus Multrum supply not only the toilet and the composter, but also a service of emptying it, just like the night soil men did 200 years ago.

Shower like the Japanese

The other source of waste and inefficiency is the shower. They are designed so badly; the shower heads aim down, when really, like a bidet, they should probably aim up. The water runs constantly, even when you are applying soap or shampoo. You are usually standing in a slippery dangerous tub or in a tiny stall where you cannot move out of the water stream. People who care about water waste, either for cost or environmental reasons, take short showers or have miserable low flow shower heads. It’s just not fun.

In Japan, you sit on a stool and have a bucket, sponge, ladle and hand shower that you only turn on when you need it. You can sit comfortably for as long as you like, in no danger of slipping, use the ladle or the hand shower to rinse. It’s really a lovely experience. It uses 10% of the water compared to a normal shower. If you do follow up with a hot bath, at least the water is shared among the whole family.

When thinking about the bathroom of the future, we should look more closely at the Japanese bathrooms of the past. They kept their water supply and their waste management far apart, and rarely had epidemics of typhoid or cholera. They would never think of putting the toilet in the same room as the tub. Instead of treating bathing as a chore, they turned it into a truly enjoyable ritual.

Women serving a man in a bathtub in Japan, c 1900. Photograph: akg-images/Coll. B. Garrett Photograph: akg-images / Coll. B. Garrett

The Japanese used to sell their excrement; the rich got more money for theirs because they had better diets and made better quality fertilizer. They farmed more intensively and had fewer farm animals, (as we probably should) and needed a lot of it. In China, the proverb said: “Treasure night soil as if it were gold.” It was valuable stuff then and still is today.

In a world where we are running out of fresh water, making artificial fertilizer from fossil fuels and approaching peak phosphorus, it is idiotic and almost criminal that we pay huge amounts in taxes to use drinking water to flush away our personal fertilizer and phosphorus and dump it in the ocean. In the future, they should be paying us.

Lloyd Alter is managing editor of TreeHugger.

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