Member Since: 8/30/2011
Posts: 21,667
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San Francisco experiments with planter-based pee stations
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Designed in response to a rampant public urination problem, PPlanter is a smart and ecologically sensitive public urinal that conserves water while prettying up things with bamboo.
Open-minded but not always easy-going, San Francisco is the kind of place where it’s easy to do certain things that may prove to be more formidable — or even impossible — tasks in other major cities. Things like recycling your yoga tank, munching on hyper-local produce at a baseball game, composting the remnants of last night’s dinner party, and, until recently, going on a casual stroll around your neighborhood without pants.
One thing, however, that San Francisco has never quite been able to nail down is an ecologically responsible, aesthetically inoffensive method in which full-bladdered residents and visitors alike can urinate in public. Important stuff!
Sure, there are always Starbucks and hotel lobbies and back alleyways if nature calls at a most inopportune moment. And then there's the city’s automated, freestanding public restrooms, which, more or less, have been “hijacked by junkies and sex workers.” Apparently, the fleet of Paris-inspired pay toilets have gotten so bad that the city’s sizable homeless population know better than to risk entering them. As a result of all this en plein air urinating because there's nowhere else to go, pockets of San Francisco have taken on a bit of a distinctive pee stink (which I'm guessing is delightful when combined with the "rotten egg stench" of backed-up sewer pipes caused by a sharp influx of low-flow toilet installations across the city).
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Read the full article here! http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/resear...sed-public-pee
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