The Toilet Principle

Depending on the condition of your bladder and bowels, you’ll go to the bathroom sooner or later in the morning—most likely sooner. There, in private, you’ll engage in a perfectly natural activity that people in this culture don’t talk about. You’ll produce what Americans call waste, and some of it will probably be what we euphemistically call solid waste. As it says more directly on the bumpersticker, shit happens. And it happens very curiously. In Developing Ecological Consciousness, Christopher Uhl wonders why “we take two perfectly good resources—human manure and fresh water—and splat them together in the toilet bowl, making them both useless.”

After shit does happen, you’ll probably wipe yourself with toilet paper, using some of the 53 million sheets that are used on this campus each year. And if you are a good citizen, you’ll flush the poop and paper (and the water) down the drain, where it will be out of sight and out of mind. If you’re a normal American, you won’t think twice about it. This is what Philip Slater calls “the toilet principle of American life”—the idea that we don’t have to deal with the unpleasant dimensions of our lives, because somebody else will take care of them.

But if you’re a curious student, you’ll have some questions. How much shit (not counting bullshit) is produced at St. Olaf in a day? Where does it go? What happens to it? What’s the environmental impact of this excretion? Where did the water come from that washed the crap away? Why do we use purified drinking water in toilets? Is our use of water sustainable? Does this waste need to be wasted?