This is an article for the fellas, but ladies listen up, and pass the message on to the loved upright pee-er in your life.
Water is the ultimate renewable resource, but the demand for clean water has nearly quadrupled in the last 50 years. The shortage is mostly the result of overpopulation, corruption and mismanagement. These negative issues seem foreign at their core, as if a water shortage is only felt in those distant Heart of Darkness nations where lack of God and television are far greater issues anyway. Unfortunately, for our isolation-minded Texas bubble, the issue hits very close to home due to the scientific estimations that cities like San Antonio, El Paso and Albuquerque could be completely dry in the next decade.
SMU students and people everywhere should take stock in this important issue. The school should be commended for their efforts in integrating water-friendly items like those spiffy new waterless urinals making appearances in men’s restrooms all around the school, but you may be wondering how you, a simple male college student, can make a difference in the water shortage.
I’m not suggesting the idealistic approach of writing a letter to your congressman that will certainly be lost in the shuffle of bureaucratic apathy, or doing something lame like writing an opinion article in your school newspaper. Instead, we should as a male student body, unite together and say “no” to a waterless future by doing what makes the most sense: peeing in the sink!
When considering the 3.8 liters per flush wasted by the average urinal and six liters per flush expelled by the average toilet bowl, it is easy to do some math and see the value in using a sink (which by design and function is really no different from a toilet bowl) for your No.1 export. Also, urine is, except for rare medical cases, sterile and odorless. It is much more likely that the blood, saliva and mucus commonly found in bathroom sinks would be harmful to a person than their own urine would. And when you combine that with the small splash of faucet water that would be necessary to wash it all down, the case for the safety and sanity of sink-peeing seems obvious.
The main problem with this view comes from having to break down a paradigm that has long held great power in our American society; the one which states that urine belongs solely in the toilet and that a toilet must be one of the two objects (urinal and toilet bowl). American men have become accustomed to this during their years of living and drinking liquids.
Perhaps we can help illuminate the ability most people already possess to change the way they live in the bathroom in order to accommodate what society requires of them. I have heard many personal stories from peers (no pun intended) who have spent time in foreign countries, like China, which require visitors to do their business into holes in the floor of little dirt or tiled stalls, which have a far worse drainage capacity than the average American sink. When asked why someone would ever do this, the response is that there is no other choice. I believe that this is the manner in which sink-peeing and other waterless ways of doing bathroom business should be viewed.
Of course, our long-term hope is that America and the rest of the world can wean themselves off of wasteful bathroom accessories and other practices that treat water as if it is the never-ending natural resource it has long been believed to be.
However, the more important concept to be taken away from this article is the belief that we shouldn’t be afraid to try and tackle the world’s problems and the world’s misconceptions. For many years it has been public opinion that has led societies to self-destruction, and today is your chance to defy this precedent by saying that the Earth is too important to not pee in a sink!
Eric Park is a sophomore accounting and Spanish double major. He can be reached for comment at epark@smu.edu.
