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| The Uritrottoir urinal |
In cities the world over,
men (and, to a lesser extent, women) who urinate in the street — al fresco —cost
millions of dollars for cleaning and the repair of damage to public
infrastructure.
Now, Paris has a new
weapon against what the French call “les pipis sauvages” or “wild
peeing”: an eco-friendly public toilet that looks more like a modernist
flower box than a receptacle for human waste.
You can even grow flowers
in its compost.
The Parisian innovation
was spurred by a problem of public urination so endemic that City Hall recently
proposed dispatching a nearly 2,000 officers to try to prevent bad behavior,
which also includes leaving dog waste on the street and littering cigarette
butts. Fines for public urination are steep — about $75.
Even that was not
deterrent enough, officials say. A small brigade of sanitation workers still
has to scrub about 1,800 square miles of sidewalk each day.
Paris public toilet
Uritrottoir — a combination of the French words for “urinal” and “pavement” —
was designed by Faltazi, a Nantes-based industrial design firm.
The Uritrottoir has
graffiti-proof paint and does not use water. Its top section also doubles as an
attractive flower or plant holder.
It works by storing urine
on a bed of dry straw, sawdust or wood chips. Monitored remotely by a “urine
attendant” who can see on a computer when the toilet is full, the urine and
straw is carted away to the outskirts of Paris, where it is turned into compost
that can later be used in public gardens or parks.
Fabien Esculier, an
engineer who is known in the French media as “Monsieur Pipi” because of his
expertise on the subject, said the Uritrottoir was more eco-friendly than the
dozens of existing public toilets which are connected to the public sewage
system.
“Its greatest virtue is
that it doesn’t use water, and produces compost that can be used for public
gardens and parks,” he said.
Two of the toilets were
installed on Tuesday outside Paris’s Gare de Lyon, a railway station that has
become ground zero in the capital’s war against public urination. The SNCF,
France’s state-owned national railway, plans to roll out more across the
capital if the Uritrottoir is a success.
“I am optimistic it will work,” said Maxime
Bourette, the SNFC maintenance official who ordered the toilets for the
railway. “Everyone is tired of the mess.”
It remains to be seen
whether the toilets are cost effective. The SNCF paid about $9,730 for two
toilets. It will cost about $865 a month to pay a sanitation worker to clean
the toilets and take away the waste. A large model can handle the outflow of
600 people; a smaller model absorbs 300 trips to the toilet.
A designer of the
Urritoir, Laurent Lebot, 45, an industrial engineer who has also invented an
eco-friendly vacuum cleaner, said “Public urination is a huge problem in
France. Urine degrades lamp posts and telephone poles, damages cars, pollutes
the Seine and undermines everyday life of a city. Cleaning up wastes water, and
detergents are damaging for the environment.”
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| "Fountain" |
Among the highest fines
for an act of public urination — about $37,500 — was meted out to 77-year-old
Pierre Pinoncelli, a French citizen who in 1993 urinated on the artist Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Dadaist
porcelain urinal “Fountain”— signed “R.Mutt” and considered a masterpiece of
conceptual art — before hitting it with a hammer.
In 2006, he was fined
about $230,000 after he attacked the artwork a second time.
