Researchers have come up with two new urinal designs to prevent the spillage of “ill-aimed pee.”
I have to imagine that a fair amount of that is intentional. Some people are just pigs.
I can’t explain the psychology behind it, but this really simple design technique apparently still works.
Apparently some men need a reason to aim, and will continue doing so even after they realize they’ve been bamboozled.
*some men…it’s pretty difficult to miss the bowl when seated lol
Yeah, but there’s plenty of women who don’t want to touch the toilet seat so they hover over it and get it dirty as a result.
Ironic isn’t it? It would have been fine if everyon just sat down. Just whipe the seat with a cleaning tissue first if you don’t trust it.
The waste (╯°□°)╯
DOGE needs to fix this.
The researchers suggest that if Nautilus was to replace the 56 million urinals across the U.S., around 1 million liters of urine would be prevented from being splashed onto the floor every day. Assuming that the volume of water needed to clean up spilled urine is about 10 times that of the volume of urine, about 10 million liters (2,199,692 gallons) of fresh water could be saved every day, the scientists said.
The widespread adoption of these urinal designs “would result in considerable conservation of human resources, cost, cleaning chemicals, and water usage, rendering large-scale impacts on modern society by improving sustainability, hygiene, and accessibility,” the researchers wrote.
They should drop everything and do this first thing.
Think of what we could be doing with that urine if we actually invested in recapturing it.
Not sure if youre sarcastic or not (I was), but there has actually been research if the nutrients in urine can be used as fertiliser and I believe the result was positive.
Sit and pee.
Urinals are disgusting.
/European man
But urinals are so much more efficient both in regards to water usage and time.
They’re very efficient at spreading piss all over the place, yes.
Sure pal, and it’s not like 90% of men piss standing into a toilet as well, which oftentimes ends up worse than using a urinal.
… and those same men wonder why women find them repulsive.
Sit and pee.
A little bit of piss never hurt nobody.
American here. I’ve started doing this at home and it’s just way more sanitary. No more drops off pissy toilet water splashing around.
When I’m out and about I still pee standing up because public restrooms are filthy.
Never not seen a urinal in europe
I used to be in this camp, but will now avoid public toilets whenever possible. Not having to sit on others pee and butt sweat is pretty awesome.
Us poor women gotta sit :(
Well when there are no seat covers, I always lay some TP over the seat before sitting. Or squat without sitting.
First wipe the seat, because people be nasty and leave piss droplets while hovering, then line the TP. Unless there’s no toilet seat, then it’s hover time.
People might sit more in your country, but I’ve never heard of that being particularly European.
Hmm, well there’s that. So Germany and Scandinavia ranker higher (I’m from Denmark and sometimes sit). I have to wonder how this correlates to a standard development index. It’s not unusual for the US to be a cultural outlier on those.
Stand and pee.
Sitting is bad.
/Australian man
… says the guy who wee-wees upside down
How the fuck else u supposed to water the trees?
Just turn on the rain, that’s all there’s to it
In fucking straya? That shit just decides to stop working sometimes.
Is there a third to wipe?
LEG DAY EVERY DAY
It’s because people stand too far back from the urinal, and then shake it like they are trying to kill it. Get in there, and then finish with a gentle squeeze or two and you won’t splatter everywhere.
Or, instead of that, pee sitting down.
Zero spillage.
Meh then you wasting like 4x the water.
If its yellow let it mellow. Not for too long though.
I once saw a road stop urinal that had a step that forced you to get to the right distance. Genius and simple.
Story time.
It honestly feels like about 264,000 gallons of that were spilled at a placed I used to work. I still have no idea who the culprit(s) was.
No kidding, the problem was so bad that building management stepped in and… added chamomile scented floor mats beneath the urinals to catch and deodorize the… ugh (gross)… drippings. It was such a strong smell that it wafted out into the hallway with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. This prompted some of the women in the office to remark at how unfair it was that the men’s room was obviously getting all this extra attention. I almost can’t describe the mixture of disappointment and disgust on their faces once I explained why this was happening.
I also once had to explain to my wife that the above situation, along with the smell of urinal cakes and most gas-station-restroom deodorizers, are the reason why chamomile tea is a hard pass for me.
Sounds maybe a plumbing problem.
Anyone, whether it’s man or woman, who pisses or shits or whatever all over a toilet (i.e. not inside) has quite likely never cleaned a fucking toilet in their life.
Source: Have cleaned toilets, not just my own, before - it has changed me.
I mean the dick is sometimes arbitrary, even when you make sure as not to have any foreskin in the way of your urethra.
But if that happens to me, I’m usually courteous enough to take a hit of paper and at least dab most of it away. But if it’s a rank toilet with already piss waving on the floor, no thanks. Sorry. Can’t help, the amount of toilet paper in one cubicle isn’t enough. And usually the places with that level of hygiene don’t necessarily have even a toilet seat, let alone several rolls of paper.
I’ve started sitting to pee, when at home
I’m doing MY part!!!
“Would you like to know more?”
Ultimate solution:
deleted by creator
Gotta paint some faces on there, with puckered lips.
I want to know how they estimated that
Do a small test with a single user, take the amount of spillage then times it by the pissing population and average numbers of wees a day.
I do like the Nautilus and wish the designed for everyone philosophy was the predominant one. Especially you get one lower level one put in when they could all be functional for everyone.
“The researchers’ Cornucopia and Nautilus designs both achieved a significant reduction in urine splashing, with the Cornucopia performing best. However, the Nautilus was considered the most ideal design due to its height, which would allow shorter people — including children or those in wheelchairs — to more easily use it. Its larger gape would also be easier to clean, and would be more accepting of poor aim, and therefore would also be appropriate for use on boats or airplanes.”
I love the mental image of a government employee having the job of spilling barrels of piss into bathrooms around the nation
Citation needed.
It is literally in the article: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/4/4/pgaf087/8098745
Spilled makes it sound like someone’s clumsily carrying around a barrel of urine throughout public toilets.
Thank you protestor. I mean it doesn’t even pass the possibility test. 300m people population, 1m litres ≈ 300L per person, per day?
You got your numbers mixed around.
1m liters/340m men = 0.00294 liters per day
That’s just under 3ml, which is very little, but still seems high. Assuming that not every man is using only the urinal, the number per urinal usage is even higher. But I also don’t know american public bathrooms, are they that filthy?
I’m sure there’s one weirdo responsible for ~70m liters, peeing at the floor at every opportunity.
It’s not my fault. It just flails around like a garden hose and even with both hands I simply don’t have the strength to wrangle that python.
It’s only about 170m men, so almost 6ml
Oh damn. I sure did.
It’s the opposite, it would be 1/300 L/person/day, or 1L per 300 persons
I seriously doubt this number, as it’s roughly 7ml for every male in America. I recall from chemistry classes that there are about 10 drops of water in a ml, so that’s 70 full-size drops - or a lot more small droplets - hitting the floor during a day of peeing a few times. A lot of it would land on the front of our pants, so it would be super common for guys to have pee liberally splattered all over our pants. That just doesn’t happen, unless maybe you did something weird like pee straight at a tile wall. The only way this could be true is if there are a significant number of guys who deliberately pee on the floor. Anybody wanna fess up?
It’s more like 6ml (264172/166100000 gallons), and considering the average man produces between 800 and 2000ml per day, that’s like a 0.5% spill rate.
Also it says nothing about the rate being evenly distributed over the days, it could be that the average guy spills a fraction of a liter in one slip up every couple weeks, not 6ml every single day. Plus the young and elderly likely throw off those averages.
Lastly, your assumption that most drops go on the pants ignores the whole point of the new design this article is about: the splashback. They claim most of the urine that misses a urinal splashes out in microdroplets.
I quit caring a while back so I could be driving up the numbers.
Seems like a complete lie. Men might lose a few drops due to the shape of the bowl tops. It’s certainly not worth anyone tearing out urinals in the hope some hypothetical piss splashage goes down.
And personally a better goal for urinal design is water reduction. i.e. urinals that use no water, or the bare minimum to flush the piss through.
It’s a little more than 1/2 a teaspoon, per person. Not exactly hard to believe.
Men aren’t dumping half a teaspoon of piss on the floor. Adults are capable of aiming and pissing and the only waste might be where piss strikes a surface and droplets escape the bowl - assuming the bowl was terrible and everyone in the nation pissed at the exact angle to cause droplets to achieve escape velocity. It’s an absurd generalisation and also an absurd problem in search of a solution.
a better goal for urinal design is water reduction. i.e. urinals that use no water
Don’t get me started on those “zero water” urinals. They start to stink and accumulate all kinds of nasty in a matter of weeks. There’s a reason we flush all of that stuff down the toilet and into the sewers.
They have them in all the McDonald’s around here and I’ve never noticed any difference in smell. There is a sticker near the urinal saying they save tens of thousands of litres of drinking water per year which I can believe. I think the system has some kind of valve and siphon to prevent smells.