On my way home after a surprising low-water spring run on Ontario’s Upper Black, I stopped at the Sandman Inn and Restaurant for coffee. The only thing keeping me awake was thinking about how I was going to explain the fist-sized dent I put in the bow of Andrew’s new open boat. I suppose I could have been more to the right going over the drop, but where was the spring run-off that usually makes this class IV falls a clean run?
We ran out of water at our house this past winter. A dry fall and no mid-winter melt must have lowered the water table below the reach of our drilled well. Melting snow on the wood stove for tea is romantic at first, but after months of lugging around five-gallon jugs, the Little House on the Prairie feeling quickly dries up.
In North America we use an average of 1,400 gallons of water per capita per day. Industry and agriculture suck 90 percent of this, but still, each person carries 28 five-gallon jugs of river into their home each day. We didn’t require this many jugs of course because in Quadeville you can still slip into your Sorels and piss off your front porch. Not everyone is so lucky.
Back behind the wheel, coffee in one hand and dicta-phone in the other, I began brainstorming the framework for the next national environmental campaign: Stand Up and Save Our Rivers—the instal- lation of urinals in every household.
It might be slow to catch on, like Blue Box and composting, but soon urinals would make it into every home.
It would become a political issue of course and one sure to pass—what man would vote against mandatory urinal use?
My favourite: If “urinal” not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
No more “leave it up or down” domestics, and think of the water we’d save. Water that would flow in our rivers. Water that would have cushioned my landing and saved the bow of my borrowed boat. I was sure that I was onto something, but like all credible green movements I needed some statistical research to support my campaign.
There are roughly 330 million flushers in the United States and Canada and 50 percent of those are men using, on average, five gallons per flush and five flushes per day. North American men flush a grand total of 4.1 billion gallons per day. Now, let’s say that four out of five of these 4.1 billion gallons could be urinal-based. Using only one gallon per pull of the stainless handle, men alone would save 3.3 billion gallons of water per day.
Dividing per-day use by hours, minutes, seconds and converting gallons to cubic feet, it works out that by installing urinals in every home in North America we’d prevent a staggering 5,812 cubic feet of water per second from flushing into our sewers. That’s the equivalent of five Ocoees, one and half Frasers and six raging Upper Black Rivers flowing day and night, 365 days a year.
So you see Andrew, it’s not really my fault. If this urinal thing had caught on five years ago, there would have been plenty of water that day and I wouldn’t have dented your boat.
This article first appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of Rapid Magazine.
