TOILETS: AT THE SEAT OF TECHNOLOGY?

A hot topic today, along with the debt ceiling, climate change and weather, apparently is the toilet. Suddenly, something that seems to be useful but mundane has become quite exciting.

One of the lesser publicized achievements of the recent, and last, voyage of the shuttle Atlantis was the astronauts' testing of the "baggie system." This system is intended to recycle sweat and urine on the mission into drinkable water. It has been reported that the system can make about a litre of "sports drink" in 4 to 6 hours. The energy potential for such drinks in sports and politics may have no limits.

This month, the Gates Foundation announced a new program to "reinvent the toilet." A spokesperson for the foundation acknowledged that there are no silver bullets in reinventing the toilet. Given the price of silver, that is understandable. The concern, of course, is that over 2 billion people in the world are said to have no access to flush toilets.

A university scientist who received a $400,000 grant from the foundation is reported to have developed a solar-powered portable toilet as a solution. The sun powers an electro-chemical reaction to break down water and waste into hydrogen gas that in turn could be stored in fuel cells to provide energy for cloudy days and night use. In one of those useless catalogs that clog one's mailbox, I once saw an automatic toilet seat that went up or down depending on use and user. I wonder whether sun power could be used for that, too.

All this news again causes me to reflect upon the cottage outhouse days of my faded youth. The outhouse worked on both sunny and cloudy days and at night. It required no maintenance except for some painting, which was my job. It also provided shelter for many spiders and other varmints. Frankly, the current "modern" toilets sometimes frighten me. They remind me of the system of pneumatic tubes that were used to send messages to different departments in department stores years ago. The toilets today flush with such a whoosh that it causes me to fear loss of flesh were I not jump up quickly.

And so the mundane can be exciting.