Pipe Dreams
The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2022 NASW Science in Society Journalism Award
Longlisted for the 2022 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books
From an award-winning science journalist, a “deeply researched, entertaining, and impassioned exploration of sanitation” (Nature) and the future of the toilet—for fans of popular science bestsellers by Mary Roach.
Most of us do not give much thought to the centerpiece of our bathrooms, but the toilet is an unexpected paradox. On the one hand, it is a modern miracle: a ubiquitous fixture in a vast sanitation system that has helped add decades to the human life span by reducing disease. On the other hand, the toilet is also a tragic failure: less than half of the world’s population can access a toilet that safely manages body waste, including many right here in the United States. And it is inefficient, squandering clean water as well as the nutrients, energy, and information contained in the stuff we flush away. While we see radical technological change in almost every other aspect of our lives, we remain stuck in a sanitation status quo—in part because the topic of toilets is taboo.
Fortunately, there’s hope—and Pipe Dreams daringly profiles the growing army of sewage-savvy scientists, engineers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and activists worldwide who are overcoming their aversions and focusing their formidable skills on making toilets accessible and healthier for all.
This potential revolution in sanitation has many benefits, including reducing inequalities, mitigating climate change and water scarcity, improving agriculture, and optimizing health. Author Chelsea Wald takes us on a wild world tour from a compost toilet project in Haiti, to a plant in the Netherlands that salvages used toilet paper from sewage, and shows us a toilet seat that can watch users’ poop for signs of illness, among many other fascinating developments.
“Toilet humor is one thing, but toilet fact, as digested by skilled science writer Wald, is quite another…[Pipe Dreams is] a highly informative, well-reasoned call to rethink the throne” (Kirkus Reviews).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science journalist Wald debuts with a thoughtful and funny survey of "today's toilet revolutionaries." The "Great Stink" of 1858, she writes, when putrid smells permeated London, necessitated the creation of a new sewer system; since then, the flush toilet and indoor plumbing have been the standard of civility. Wald argues a growing world population and an increasing need for clean water has made the modern toilet (and the "flush and forget" culture it created) "anachronistic" and unsustainable. Along the way, Wald interviews toilet innovators and sanitation engineers in the Netherlands who are working on "vacuum toilets," and workers at a nonprofit in Haiti who struggle to provide sanitary living conditions in low-income communities (in 2017, Wald notes, 700 million people worldwide relied on "hanging latrines" or "bucket toilets," which are emptied into streams or open sewers). Wald covers toilet concepts and decentralized wastewater treatment models that conserve water and provide useful by-products, like grass that can be harvested and fed to livestock and sludge that can be baked into bricks. At home with an awkward topic, the author lucidly discusses "pee-cycling" (including the extraction of phosphorous from urine to be used as agricultural fertilizer) and myriad designs for water-conserving toilets. The green-minded will find this insightful and entertaining study to be a fresh angle on a perhaps underappreciated environmental concern.
