This is good - I saw it some time back and have often thought about it. It uses prevention and thinking rather than, well, the opposite.
The premise is that squirting chemicals into the environment will-nilly isn't good. The second point is that it often isn't necessary. If it is not necessary then coating (and staining?) the bowl in blue (the colour of clean?) coloured drips is a small and mindless act of pollution (ask the folks who manage the sewage plants, or a fish).
As the author points out, if you scrub with the brush once a week, your toilet will remain nice and clean. That's it.
It is also interesting to contemplate the marketing of toilet cleaners which are all about making us afraid of germs and smells. Firstly the smells: open the window and wait. Secondly those germs. "Kills 99% of all known germs, even under the rim!". Picture the team of researchers swabbing peoples fingers in trains running up and down the length of the UK. Guess what they found! Around 50% of those swabbed had faecal matter on their fingers! The last place we need to be worried about germs is under the toilet's rim, it's a hoax! Worry about the light switch!
---
http://www.hedgeapple.nl/downloads/How-to-clean-a-toilet-without-chemicals.pdf
I got published! After a long time writing this thing, and then quite a bit of heavy editing, I appeared in print.
Sometimes when you stop and think for a moment, the things we do can seem a little strange. For example flushing the toilet. It is a wonderful system: clean, hygienic, and effortless – the greatest accomplishment for public health of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, then, I’m shitting and/or peeing into 10 litres of fresh drinking water, thus immediately turning it into toxic waste, adding a few chemicals like bleach or toilet freshener, cooking oil poured down kitchen sinks and unused medicines washed down hospital sinks. It’s then pumped through an underground sewer network, joined by heavy metal-containing runoff water from roads and industrial areas. And not to forget the 159 toilet rolls per household per year – that’s about 270,000 trees flushed away every day worldwide according to the WWF. And then we try to get all the stuff that went into the water, out again – at great expense – the water was needed only for transporting our waste from A to B.
Can this really be the best way to deal with our daily excretions?
Download the article in PDF form here:
http://www.hedgeapple.nl/downloads/046-048_DieMaskeArticle.pdf
See the Die Maske website for more information about the project:
http://www.diemaske.at/ - click the little union jack for the Union Jackish language.
http://www.moderntoilet.com.tw/en/about.asp
Can anyone work out what this really is? Has anybody been to one?
Disclaimer: No part of this website or any part of the content, copy and images may be reproduced or re-distributed in any format without the prior approval of its owner. thehalfhog.com is very happy to permit widespread use of its intellectual property but permission must be gained in advance. To get permission, please
