Urinators are the problem

[Bill Peckham]

(h/t  effect measure http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/ )
Too much nutrient in wastewater can lead to serious water pollution. The nutrients act as food for micro-organisms and algae who use up dissolved oxygen in the water when they metabolize them. When oxygen levels go too low -- when the stream or river or pond "goes anaerobic" -- new micro-organisms predominate, ones that don't use oxygen as their final electron acceptor but use other oxidizing agents. Many use sulfur compounds, and when these become reduced by the transferred electrons they produce hydrogen sulfide, the rotten egg odor. Hydrogen sulfide not only smells bad. It is quite toxic.
            
It turns out one of the major sources of nutrients in domestic wastewater nowadays is ordinary human urine. Not that human urine these days is so ordinary. It's rich in lots of things besides normal body waste, among them megadoses of vitamins, lots of pharmaceutical agents and antibiotics, hormones from oral contraceptives and lots of other things we ingest and then excrete through our kidneys. Only 1% of wastewater volume, urine is 50% - 80% of the nutrient load by some estimates. Removing the stuff that urine adds is a major burden for wastewater treatment plants.

One strategy now being suggested is to treat the urine separately. How do you do that? With a new kind of toilet, called the NoMix:

. . . wastes collected at the back of the bowl are flushed into the sewers with water in the normal manner. In the front compartment, urine is collected and drained with a small amount of flushing water -- or undiluted -- into a local storage tank.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070308085444.htm

Here's some more of the story from ScienceDaily, adapted from a Press Release from the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, promoters of the idea:

Ideally, treatment should permit recycling of nutrients as fertilizers and, at the same time, removal of problematic micropollutants. For example, 98% of the phosphorus in urine can be recovered by precipitation with magnesium. The product - struvite - is an attractive fertilizer, free of pharmaceuticals and hormones. In Switzerland, nutrients from human urine could serve as substitutes for at least 37% of the nitrogen and 20% of the phosphorus demand that is currently met by imported artificial fertilizers

Would you say the design gender neutral?
Here's a pic:

[Joe Paul]

The commode is OK for men if we sat down, God knows we cant aim
I guess kidney failure makes us "environmentally friendly" 

[Sluff]

The commode is OK for men if we sat down, God knows we cant aim
I guess kidney failure makes us "environmentally friendly" 

There is a silver lining in everything. 

[bluedove57]

For us the toilet is not a problem because we don't pee and if we do it is so little.  I guess we won't be polluting planet earth. 

[Jill D.]

Bill - my brother told me about a friend of his that has a toilet in his pole barn that incinerates the waste. Have you ever heard of that? Seems like developing something like that would be good for the ecosystem.