Public

Crap and Trade: Why public toilets should pay you

What? You've been giving away your urine for free?

Many of us haven't just been giving our waste away; we've been paying to unload it. Hundreds of cities have automated public toilets, known as APTs. In New York or Los Angeles, you drop in a quarter, and the door opens. But your quarter hardly pays the bills. New York's new APTs reportedly cost more than $100,000 apiece; Los Angeles' cost $300,000; Seattle installed five at a cost of $6.6 million. At 25 cents a flush, 20 to 130 times a day, a toilet brings in only $2,000 to $11,000 per year.

So how does the math work out? The Los Angeles Times explains:

In Los Angeles, the facilities are part of a 20-year contract between the city and a joint venture of two companies: CBS Outdoor and JCDecaux. The latter, a French firm, has installed thousands of the sleek units worldwide, mostly in exchange for the right to sell the ads that adorn them. It's a common model that is used by the majority of American cities looking to install the loos. L.A. is guaranteed $150 million in revenue over the course of the contract. … The companies foot the bill for installing all the structures, including the toilets, and for the maintenance on each.

So the company pays the city, and in exchange, the city provides your eyeballs. Do you get a cut? A free flush, at least? Nope. You pay.

The obvious argument for making you pay is that you're getting a service, too: a clean, private place to relieve yourself. If you can't find a john, you'll have to go in the street.

Last fall, New Delhi hosted the World Toilet Summit. At the meeting, experts estimated that 700 million Indians lacked access to proper toilets. "Defecating in the open can contaminate water supplies and spread diseases such as diarrhea," Reuters observed. Accordingly, India committed to increase its spending on rural sanitation by almost half, "building toilets for hundreds of millions of its poor and homeless." The country's minister of rural development pledged, "By 2012, India will be free of defecation in the open."

Residents of Saliyar Street in Musiri are getting paid for using toilets. While people elsewhere have to hastily dig into their pockets and shell out a rupee or more to relieve themselves in a dingy public urinal, around 300 families in Musiri have found they can actually profit every time they answer nature's call. Essentially, the system serves two purposes. While it encourages people in the lower middle-class neighbourhood to use toilets, the urine collected goes for research to test its efficacy as a fertiliser.

The plan seems to be working:

Initially people in Saliyar street were amused when they heard about the use and earn facility. But now the queues are getting longer before the eco sanitation (ecosan) toilet. … Although it was the novelty of the project that initially attracted many, people have also realized the health benefits and stopped using public spaces to relieve themselves. ''Now even children in the locality do not urinate in the open, thanks to the 10 paise incentive," said [a local man].

Could a similar incentive work in the United States? Nobody's being paid to use public toilets, as far as I know. But some people get to use them for free. In Los Angeles, for example, the Times reports, "All of the APTs in the city, except two on skid row, charge a quarter for each use." Why the skid-row exception? Two reasons seem pretty clear. First, homeless people don't spend quarters lightly, if they have them at all. Second, if the city doesn't give them a free indoor place to relieve themselves, they'll use a free outdoor place: the street...

----In India, it pays to use public toilets------
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