Energy Intensive Toilets
By Karina | July 9, 2008
Last year my stepsister and I took a two week trip to Japan, and we had a really super time. (don’t worry! I bought carbon offsets for the long long plane trip.) I was really impressed at how easy it was to get around, especially considering that we don’t speak or read Japanese. We took public transportation everywhere! And because this week is the G8 summit in Japan, it seems a timely point to talk about one of the neatest parts of our trip - the amazing techno-pottie. Also timely is this article from the Washington Post all about them.
No, seriously: toilets in Japan are very high tech! While my sister and I did both make sure to use the Japanese style toilets (i.e., the type you squat over) on moving trains for the street cred, we really enjoyed the novelty of the “western” style toilets with their fancy heated seats. As the article says - there’s nothing like waking up in the chilly morning (most of the ryokan we stayed at didn’t seem to have central heating) and sitting onto a nice warm toilet seat. Talk about luxury! There are also buttons that trigger a bidet or a “courtesy flush” sound so no one else can hear you as you do your business.
It turns out that all this luxury has a hidden price, though - in terms of environmental costs. Apparently, while Japan still uses about half the electricity per capita that the US does, these toilets are so ubiquitous they are being blamed for slowing reductions in carbon emissions. Japan has been having problems staying on-target to meet their Kyoto Protocol greenhouse-gas emissions, and part of the problem, apparently, is the number of appliances that people use in the homes. Interestingly (and not surprisingly!) energy use has risen at “almost exactly the same rate as personal spending.” The Washington Post article states that since the oil crisis of 1973 Japanese energy use in the home has increased by 213%, while industrial energy use has reduced dramatically while product output has increased. This innovation is showcased at the G8 summit. From the LA times:
“During the three-day summit, Japan’s energy-efficient products will be on full display. The large international media center was built for the summit with 95% recyclable or reusable materials and is being cooled not by air conditioners but by 7,000 tons of snow under the floor, hauled from the mountains nearby. On the schedule for spouses of G-8 leaders are visits to a zero-emission house and test-driving of eco-cars from Toyota, Honda and others.”
If you’re interested, here is an article about the zero-emission house which doesn’t include any discussion of energy-wasting commodes but does have details on the no-water clothes washer, the smart air conditioner, the wind turbine AND solar generation, and moss-covered rooftiles to reduce building temperature. SO NEAT. Also the house is over 2000 square feet, which is almost about American sized, and therefore totally transferable to our lifestyle!
But back to the issue at hand! don’t worry, there is hope for the fancy toilet seat - according to the Washington Post articles the toilet’s energy requirements have been nearly halved on the manufacturing end, and manufacturers have developed toilets that remember when you are most likely to use the can, so it can prepare the nice heated seat and warmed bidet water for you. Sort of like a programmable thermostat for your bum, only it’s smart enough to do the programming without your help. Talk about luxury!
Do you have any fancy toilet experiences? What do you think about all these gadgets for modern luxurious living?
Photo from flickr user rytc under creative commons license.
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I’ll admit to falling in love with the cleanliness of those toilets with the automatically-changing plastic-sheathed seat. Press a button and you can feel safe sitting right down on that public toilet! But of course, it’s a really really bad setup from an environmental perspective, so I get pretty annoyed when I do see them. Paper seat covers work just fine and are biodegradable, so they are , of course, a better option.
i just wipe and sit…or even better i let someone I know go first and then i know exactly whose hiney has just sat on the seat. if it’s really gross i may attempt a squat, but more likely will find a better toilet to use. i don’t get the whole squat thing in the US. if folks are worried about butt and other coodies (whose transmission would be greatly reduced if we all just sat the heck down on the toilet seat rather than pissing all over it) then perhaps the US should think of squaty-potties like in Japan.
It equally amuses and annoys me that people are so afraid of toilets seats - they are actually one of the cleanest surfaces in a public restroom. The door handle, on the other hand…
I really want to get a dual flush, low flow toilet. For now I have water displacement bottles in my tank and if it’s yellow, I let it mellow.
ha - it is so true that the actual toilet seat is really not the dirtiest part of a bathroom!
and, those that squat … be kind and wipe that seat after yourself. please.
i usually take just a little bit of TP to cover the parts of the seat that my hiney will touch … way less than the seat cover option and i feel better sitting and taking my time.
i thought japanese toilets were better for the environment, since you can choose big flush or little flush. i didn’t know about all the comfort features!
my company is moving into a new office soon, an old building that we (as an architecture + interior design firm) renovated. we’re big on sustainable architecture and LEED certification and all that, so we tried to incorporate that wherever possible.. including fancy big flush/little flush toilets! i’m psyched!
ps: we almost ended up with wind turbines, too, but i guess that was just wishful thinking…
Having lived in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with only an outhouse for a tiolet, a heated toilet seat sounds almost hysterical! I don’t think I have ever worried over or even thought about having a heated tiolet seat, that is definitely a luxury.
Some gadgets are good, but some just sort of spoil society into almost a disfunction - aka, kinda killing our instincts, and turning humans into consumer machines.
Traditional japanese baths and bedding are much lighter a footrpint then our stuff here though. Hope we don’t pick up the heated tiolet habit.
think of how nice a heated seat would have been in the winter in your outhouse! on the other hand, the nice thing about winter in an outhouse is that there aren’t as many creepy-crawlies to look out for because it’s cold.
are you kidding me? you CARE about a warmed toilet seat? why not use the technology for some one who doesn’t have anything, or cut the use from your footprint (or someone else’s that is huge) or something? it seems to me crazy to spend time/money/energy on this type of thing (meaning a service that again removes us from the reality of our lives) and not use the brain power/money/energy for a true need? i don’t get it.
dude, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it! more seriously, though, I think it’s interesting to see how a much more efficient society than mine still has these eco-efficiency blind spots.
and I don’t have a warmed toilet seat, I experience them when I was traveling in japan last year.
I used to tutor for a Japanese family. They actually had one of these toilets in their house. They must have ordered it from back home during their 3 year stay here in the states.
When I went to use it once (I was pregnant and desperate, otherwise, I would have skipped it), I took so long to figure out how it worked, that the mom got worried about me. I had to try and explain that I had never used a potty like that and we all got a giggle out of my inability to use the potty.
I will say that while we got around mostly fine without understanding written Japanese, the toilet was one of the places I really wished I could read it!
At my work place (large state agency dedicated to the environment) they have installed flushless or waterless urninals in the men’s bathroom. However this is only offset by the fact that the women’s rooms have automatic flush toliets that flush between 1 and 3 times per visit. Do they think that grown women don’t know how to flush a toliet?
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I lived in Korea for 2 years, and we had one of these in our house (it’s fairly common in nicer houses for people to have them at home, but definitely not as common to see them in public toilets as it was in Japan). The bidet was cool at first, but I probably used it less than 10 times a year, and we never turned on the heat. A warm toilet seat kind of creeps me out, because it seems like somebody who’d been sitting there a long time just got up. Definitely an unneeded luxury.
But something that was really cool and environmentally friendly was the foot pedal to turn the kitchen sink on and off. So you didn’t have to use your hands when they were full of dishes you were washing or anything. The handle of the faucet was only for adjusting the temperature and strength of the water, you had to do all the turning on and off by foot, which always confused my guests without pedals at home! I loved that thing!!
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