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New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

phys.org

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Re: New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

#61

Post by jmvoodoo »

birgitt wrote: post #15

Hi Everyone! Birgitt here from spotLESS Materials -- we are commercializing this technology and some of the authors of the Nature Sustainability paper are part of our team. I'll try answering some of the questions I'm seeing. Would love to hear your feedback! Check out our products at: https://www.spotlessmaterials.com/shop Check out the full research article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0421-0#ci…

If it's not harmful to sea life then a great potential market for this would be marine toilets. They all use extremely small amounts of water (especially the freshwater ones) and skid marks are always a problem. Boaters are also used to maintaining things like coating.

Smaller market but a good niche to start and spread from.

Re: New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

#62

Post by glofish »

sfsafs wrote: post #44
glofish wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"any effect on their quality of life" - what I meant ... now does being motivated to fix a leaky toilet that otherwise you wouldn't have bothered to do count as a quality of life decrease?

How many people have leaky toilette that they can easily fix to lower the impact of higher fees? vs. How many people are living on the margins and that extra $10 represents the last meal to get to the end of the month?

You are derailing the discussion - we were talking about the practicality of covering toilets with a slick substance while touting the water-saving potential of said act. To which I stated that instead of covering the toilet with that slick substance we'd save more if we made water a little more costly to dissuade people from wasting water on a large scale.

Now all of a sudden that got turned into some poor family in an undisclosed location not being able to feed themselves because water is too expensive ... quite the logical hyperjump ...

Re: New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

#64

Post by journalctl »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #13
glofish wrote: post #2

Unpopular opinion warning! Getting people to save water is one of the simplest things in the world! Water is the cheapest material that people have access to. It is so cheap it has been devalued to the extreme. Fill a backyard pool? That'll be less than $100... Raise the price a little bit, all of a sudden people will use less water, they won't even notice any effect and have the same quality of life. Framing a scien…

> Water is the cheapest material that people have access to. You don't live in the American South. I actually suspect you live near one of the Great Lakes where the water is dirt cheap. My water bill is higher than my Internet bill.

I don’t mean this judgmentally, but how much water do you use? The bulk of residential water use tends to be for landscaping, in particular watering lawns. When my city raised rates for excess water usage, all of the homeowners complained, even though they require vastly more water infrastructure and end up using a lot more water for their lawns.

Re: New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

#65

Post by [deleted] »

xiphias2 wrote: post #18
gpm wrote: post #14

500 flushes is less than a year for a toilet used twice a day (say before and after bed), I hope that coating is cheap, easy to apply, and doesn't create substantial pollution either as it is created or used. I hope the sewer system doesn't need to just add water as a result. Toilet water use doesn't seem like a big enough contributor to the problem that it's much use optimizing it in most places. But there are proba…

The additional maintainance maybe doesn’t worth it for homes, but clean toilets would be important in commercial space.

[deleted]

Re: New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

#66

Post by gpm »

HorizonXP wrote: post #17
gpm wrote: post #14

500 flushes is less than a year for a toilet used twice a day (say before and after bed), I hope that coating is cheap, easy to apply, and doesn't create substantial pollution either as it is created or used. I hope the sewer system doesn't need to just add water as a result. Toilet water use doesn't seem like a big enough contributor to the problem that it's much use optimizing it in most places. But there are proba…

I tend to agree, but I (and maybe you) live in the Great Lakes region where water is abundant and cheap. Optimizing water use just doesn't seem worth it. But I can totally see this coating helping in regions like India, who have a real problem with open-air defecation.

I do live near the great lakes, but my comment about not worth optimizing is really just that as a percentage of global water usage toilets are tiny (compared to agricultural and industrial. Agricultural is 80-90% in the states for instance). Optimization only really makes much sense where locally that is false.

There are definitely plenty of deserts in the world though, so it's not much of a nitpick.

Re: New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

#67

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

JaRail wrote: post #57
birgitt wrote: post #15

Hi Everyone! Birgitt here from spotLESS Materials -- we are commercializing this technology and some of the authors of the Nature Sustainability paper are part of our team. I'll try answering some of the questions I'm seeing. Would love to hear your feedback! Check out our products at: https://www.spotlessmaterials.com/shop Check out the full research article here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0421-0#ci…

> 3. Regarding the environmental friendliness of our coatings: Our product is based on silicone. It has been shown in the scientific literature that silicone can be decomposed naturally in soil within 4-7 days. It breaks down in silica, water, and carbon dioxide. "Based on silicone" does not mean "degrades like silicone." It also doesn't mean your coating will behave like the silicone "in the scientific literature."…

I also have the same concerns about your product.

Re: New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

#68

Post by basicplus2 »

I find a toilet brush works just fine..

Less water in the sewer is only going to create problems for the flow rates further down the line, Possibly blockages in the pipe on your property.

and i would prefer not to put silicone (if that is what they are using as it is "like hair conditioner") as some silicones can take 400 to 500 years to break down

Re: New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

#69

Post by icebraining »

stephenr wrote: post #51
tigerlily wrote: post #9

What is this stuff made from? I hope they think of the fish, that's all.

Raw sewage probably isn’t that great for fish either.

Yeah, it may be a concern in terms of extra costs in sewage treatment.

Re: New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water

#70

Post by catalogia »

war1025 wrote: post #24
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Water is the cheapest material that people have access to. You don't live in the American South. I actually suspect you live near one of the Great Lakes where the water is dirt cheap. My water bill is higher than my Internet bill.

Something I have wondered a couple times when this comes up: When people say "Water bill", do they mean solely water, or water + sewer? Where I live, the two are bundled, and the total bill is also higher than our internet bill. (~$100 for water vs $75 for internet) I live in Iowa, which doesn't have Great Lakes levels of water lying around, but we also have no shortage of the stuff.

Some people (those who own wells) don't have real "water bills" at all and are actually referring to a portion of their electric bill corresponding to the well pump usage when they say "water bill". (Depending on well depth and usage patterns, this may or may not be a significant portion of the power bill.)
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