| Dear
EarthTalk: Wouldn’t a return to installing
bidets in bathrooms at home go a long way toward cutting
disposable tissue use and saving forests?
-- Peter K., Albany, GA
| |
Once
reserved for Europeans, bidets are now popular all
over the world -– except in North America. Pictured:
A toilet and bidet in a Westin Hotel in Italy.
© Brandi Sims, courtesy Flickr |
Besides
being more sanitary than toilet tissue, bidets—those
squirty accessories so popular in Europe, Japan and elsewhere
that clean your underside using a jet of water—are
also much less stressful on the environment than using paper.
Justin
Thomas, editor of the website metaefficient.com, considers
bidets to be “a key green technology” because
they eliminate the use of toilet paper. According to his
analysis, Americans use 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper
every year, representing the pulping of some 15 million
trees. Says Thomas: “This also involves 473,587,500,000
gallons of water to produce the paper and 253,000 tons of
chlorine for bleaching.” He adds that manufacturing
requires about 17.3 terawatts of electricity annually and
that significant amounts of energy and materials are used
in packaging and in transportation to retail outlets.
To
those who say that bidets waste water, advocates counter
that the amount is trivial compared to how much water we
use to produce toilet paper in the first place. Biolife
Technologies, manufacturer of the high-end line of Coco
bidets, says the amount of water used by a typical bidet
is about 1/8th of a gallon, with the average toilet using
about four gallons per flush. Lloyd Alter of the website
treehugger.com reports that making a single roll of toilet
paper requires 37 gallons of water, 1.3 kilowatt/hours (KWh)
of electricity and some 1.5 pounds of wood. Thomas points
out that toilet paper is also a public nuisance in that
it clogs pipes and adds a significant load onto city sewer
systems and water treatment plants.
“Basically,
the huge industry of producing toilet paper could be eliminated
through the use of bidets,” offers Thomas, who has
been testing different toilet-seat mounted units for the
past two years. He would like to someday pair a bidet with
a composting sawdust toilet for the ultimate green bathroom
experience.
Once
reserved for Europeans, bidets are now popular all over
the world—except in North America. Thomas reports
that 60 percent of Japanese households today have high-tech
bidets made by Toto called Washlets, while some 90 percent
of Venezuelan homes have bidets. Most people use a small
amount of paper to dry their posteriors after the bidet
has done its job, but more expensive air-drying models dispense
with the need for paper altogether. Thomas adds that bidets
provide important health benefits such as increased cleanliness
and “the therapeutic effect of water on damaged skin
(think rashes or hemorrhoids).”
On
the public health front, bidet maker BioRelief reports that
almost 80 percent of all infectious diseases are passed
on by human contact and that only about half of us actually
wash our hands after using the facilities—making hands-free
bidets a safer alternative all around. “If you don’t
have to use your hands at all then there is less chance
of passing or coming in contact with a virus,” claims
the company. BioRelief’s full featured BidetSpa sells
for $549, but Lloyd Alter reports that consumers willing
to go without heated water and air-drying mechanisms can
get a perfectly adequate one they can install themselves
for less than $100, such as the Blue Bidet, which retails
for just $69.
CONTACTS:
MetaEfficient;
Treehugger;
Biolife
Technologies; Toto;
Blue
Bidet.
Dear
EarthTalk: What is “vertical farming”
and how is it better for the environment?
– Jonathan Salzman, New York, NY
| |
Columbia
University professor of environmental health and microbiology,
Dickson Despommier, coined the term "vertical
farming." He says that a 30-story building built
on one city block and engineered to maximize year-round
agricultural yield could feed tens of thousands of
people. Pictured: an artist's rendition of what one
such "farmscraper" might look like.
© Vertical Farm Project |
“Vertical
farming” is a term coined by Columbia University professor
of environmental health and microbiology Dickson Despommier
to describe the concept of growing large amounts of food
in urban high-rise buildings—or so-called “farmscrapers.”
According to
the vision first developed in 1999 by Despommier and his
students, a 30-story building built on one city block and
engineered to maximize year-round agricultural yield—thanks
largely to artificial lighting and advanced hydroponic and
aeroponic growing techniques—could feed tens of thousands
of people. Ideally the recipients of the bounty would live
in the surrounding area, so as to avoid the transport costs
and carbon emissions associated with moving food hundreds
if not thousands of miles to consumers.
“Each floor
will have its own watering and nutrient monitoring systems,”
Despommier elaborated to online magazine Miller-McCune.com,
adding that every single plant’s health status and
nutrient consumption would be tracked by sensors that would
help managers ward off diseases and increase yield without
the need for the chemical fertilizers and pesticides so
common in traditional outdoor agriculture.
“Moreover,
a gas chromatograph will tell us when to pick the plant
by analyzing which flavenoids the produce contains,”
Despommier said. “It’s very easy to do…These
are all right-off-the-shelf technologies. The ability to
construct a vertical farm exists now. We don't have to make
anything new.”
With world population
set to top nine billion by 2050 when 80 percent of us will
live in cities, Despommier says vertical farming will be
key to feeding an increasingly urbanized human race. His
Vertical Farm Project claims that a vertical farm on one
acre of land can grow as much food as an outdoor farm on
four to six acres. Also, vertical farms, being indoors,
wouldn’t be subject to the vagaries of weather and
pests.
“The reason
we need vertical farming is that horizontal farming is failing,”
Despommier told MSNBC, adding that if current practices
don’t change soon, humanity will have to devote to
agriculture an area bigger than Brazil to keep pace with
global food demand. Another benefit of vertical farming
is that former farmland could be returned to a natural state
and even help fight global warming. As agricultural land
becomes forest and other green space, plants and trees there
can store carbon dioxide while also serving as habitat for
wildlife otherwise displaced by development.
Vertical farming
is not without critics, who argue that the practice would
use huge amounts of electricity for the artificial lights
and machinery that would facilitate year-round harvests.
Bruce Bugbee, a Utah State University crop physiologist,
believes that the power demands of vertical farming—growing
crops requires about 100 times the amount of light as people
working in office buildings—would make the practice
too expensive compared to traditional farming where the
primary input, sunlight, is free and abundant. Proponents
argue that vertical farms could produce their own power
by tapping into local renewable sources (solar, wind, tidal
or geothermal) as well as by burning biomass from crop waste.
CONTACT:
The
Vertical Farm Project. |
