This is the ‘washroom‘ that we built in the German Pavilion – together with a huge group of people dedicated to the ‘sanitary revolution‘. More on this below and in the ‘Bathroom readings‘ by Rosa Loo*. The pavilion doesn’t actually have a toilet, a sink or even a waste water connection. It is purely a representative building. But we wanted to work in it for six months. And we needed a loo for that. Everyone has to go to the loo – and yet it’s a taboo zone: we rarely talk about urinating, defecating, menstruating, changing nappies, emptying stoma bags and many other washroom activities in a serious way. However, we think that there is a lot to talk about: on an ecological, cultural, social and technical level.
Fortunately, we had neither fresh water nor waste water connections in the pavilion. Dry separation toilets do not require water and, thanks to their material flow separation, also form the technical basis for the recovery of valuable nutrients contained in our faeces and urine. However, solids are difficult to transport and collect over several storeys without water. Instead of using water as the transport medium, Finizio and Tom Kühne’s ‘Chute Toilet‘ works with paper bags that are inserted before each visit to the toilet. We have installed a prototype of this in the Pavilion and made it available for everyone to use. And every week we cut out and folded bags, bags, bags in our workshop!
And this is what the toilet looked like from the outside, the back end of the washroom, so to speak. This is where we collected urine and faeces. We converted the urine – many thousands of litres from many thousands of visitors – into valuable fertiliser directly on site. This was done in the ‘Nutrient Harvester‘ of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, largely developed by Michel Riechmann. He affectionately called the small box with the thick exhaust pipe his ‘urine reactor‘. Using a purely physical evaporation process, we were able to harvest powder at regular intervals, which essentially contains nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium – nutrients that we currently either produce synthetically at great energy expense or extract as finite products in mining.
We also collected the faeces over the biennial period of six months. Together with the Leibniz Institute for Vegetable and Ornamental Crops, we developed a composting concept. At regular intervals, we took the collected ‘shit‘ by vaporetto to the Agriluska farm run by organic farmer Luca Vallese in nearby San Donà di Piave. Luca then created a compost heap together with other plant additives and later fed the humus back into the agricultural cycle as fertiliser. This is not some kind of crazy eco-freak idea. A huge group of dedicated scientists, planners, politicians and practitioners are working on the sanitary and nutrient turn – away from our current linear water based system and towards circular nutrient recovery.
The public sphere continues to be characterized by a patriarchal society, where little attention is given to universal needs. The conventional design of toilets and urinals is often not ergonomically adapted to people with vulvas. In our washroom, we wanted to show alternatives, such as the ‘urin*all‘ designed by Leonie Roth and Luisa Tschumi. urin*all is a waterless, all-gender urinal that allows contactless use regardless of gender. Visitors to the German Pavilion extensively utilized it for six months, resulting in an estimated 10,000 uses. By the way, we processed the urine directly into valuable fertilizer in the connected ‘Nutrient Harvester’, as shown above!