The Green Lantern Goes to the Bathroom

How to do your business green.

By Nina Shen Rastogi
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009, at 9:34 AM ET

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Last year, you looked at how to deal with animal poop. But what about my trips to the bathroom? Should I be concerned about greening my ablutions?

Sanitation raises a host of fascinating ecological questions: Should we use processed sewage sludge to fertilize our fields? What about poop to power our appliances? For more on those questions, the Lantern directs you to Rose George's The Big Necessity, excerpts of which appeared on Slate last year. When it comes to individual toilet behavior in the Western world, though, there are pretty much two areas of concern: water and paper.

The humble commode is a thirsty appliance. In a 1999 study of 1,188 American homes, toilet flushes accounted for 27 percent of an individual's daily indoor water consumption—more than washing machines (22 percent) or showers (17 percent). Your personal toll will depend on what kind of toilet you have. If it was purchased after January 1994, federal law requires that it use 1.6 gallons or fewer per flush; otherwise, it might drain 3.5 to 7 gallons with every pull of the lever. The average American flushes his home toilet five times a day, sending 8 gallons to 35 gallons of water down the tubes.