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Composting Toilets Save Water, Spark Conversation

Composting Toilets Save Water, Spark Conversation

By Becky Bach, San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — The most radical “green” features of the City of San Jose’s new Environmental Innovation Center are concealed behind two doors marked “Women” and “Men.”

There, plopped between the other conventional stalls, are two “composting toilets,” the first ever installed in a California office building.

“You assume you get an outhouse on a trail,” said Nora Cibrian, an environmental services specialist with the city. “But you just don’t think you can do it indoors too.”

These two toilets resemble every other commode, but at a total cost of approximately $20,000, they aren’t your great-grandmother’s latrines. They skip the sewage system entirely, funneling waste into a tank in the basement the size of a commercial trash bin.

Unlike an old-fashioned outhouse, where the waste goes straight into a hole in the ground, the composting toilets use the magic of chemistry to convert it to fertilizer. Just as in a backyard compost pile full of leaves and fruit rinds, the nutrient-rich waste mixes with carbon from wood shavings in the tank. Hungry bacteria then break down the material into tiny pieces, generating heat and carbon dioxide. A fan circulates air, reducing odor and ensuring the bacteria have plenty of oxygen. It takes some additional work to complete the yearlong composting process. You have to toss in some earthworms, sift occasionally, and add about a gallon of water per day.

When it’s all done, the city will have access to mature compost, according to toilet manufacturer Don Mills, a sales director for Clivus Multrum, a Massachusetts company founded in the 1970s by environmentalist Rockefeller scion, Abby Rockefeller.

“It’s not a highly complex device,” Mills said. “It’s a consciousness-raiser as well as an actual technology.”

The design team saw the toilets as a natural fit for the city’s new Environmental Innovation Center, a $31-million facility that includes a variety of Earth-friendly innovations, said city spokeswoman Cheryl Wessling. The toilets use just ounces of water per flush — just enough to moisten a biodegradable foam solution that coats the tanks before and after each use, and much less than the one to five gallons guzzled by average toilets.

“This is definitely a learning process,” Cibrian said. “We’ll see what works and what doesn’t work and whether it can be applied elsewhere.”

The Bay Area is home to two other composting toilet installations, both outdoors. One is at the Presidio’s El Polin Spring in San Francisco and the other at Crystal Springs Golf Course in Burlingame.

The Presidio Trust installed the composting toilets near the spring in 2011 to preserve a unique watershed with a rich archeological history, said Allison Stone, the organization’s director of trails and philanthropy. She admitted they were a bit nervous at first, but are now quite happy with their off-the-grid choice.

“It’s been a great experience,” Stone said. “We have not had any major problems.”

But despite the water-saving benefits, the composting toilets have one big drawback apart from the steep upfront cost that has limited their use: Governments still see the resulting compost as sewage, sharply limiting disposal options.

Though San Jose expects to approve permits soon for the unconventional toilets at the Environmental Innovation Center, city officials haven’t decided how they will dispose of the resulting compost. Wessling said it might be used on-site to fertilize the landscaping, or the city could have Clivus haul it away for $350 a month.

The Innovation Center’s new tenants are expected to pay the maintenance costs. They include: ReStore, Habitat for Humanity’s building materials store and donation center; a household hazardous waste drop-off facility; and Prospect Silicon Valley, which will run a program to help develop clean technology.

The Presidio Trust hired a contractor to regularly sift and care for the toilets and that contractor removed the waste, Stone said.

Vermont Law School installed composting toilets indoors in 1998 and gets numerous requests to see them, said Lori Campbell, the school’s facilities manager.

“People are fascinated,” she said.

But the compost disposal poses a big drawback that advocates face coast to coast.

“It is presently the case in nearly every state that you must regard this material as sewage,” Mills said.

Vermont state law still precludes the school from using the compost on its grounds, Campbell said, calling the restriction “unfortunate.”

“It’s beautiful compost,” she said. “It’s so rich, it’s unbelievable.”

Peter Scott, an emeritus professor of physics at UC Santa Cruz and California’s foremost expert on the commodes, believes the steep upfront cost chiefly dissuades many potential buyers. He first learned about the toilets while visiting the Vermont Law School in the early 2000s with his wife, Celia, a former Santa Cruz mayor, and he has been advocating their use ever since.

“It’s an interesting problem and an interesting puzzle as to why there aren’t more of them,” Scott said. “It seems like we have a lot of opportunities.”

Photo: Bay Area News Group/MCT/LiPo Ching

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San Jose State Students Report Major Discovery In Space

San Jose State Students Report Major Discovery In Space

By Katy Murphy, San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A San Jose State undergrad grieving the loss of his mother shifted his gaze to outer space and made what could prove to be a remarkable discovery: a system of stars so dense, his professor said, astronomy has no word for it.

In only a week 21-year-old Michael Sandoval stumbled upon what he and his professor have named a hypercompact cluster, which they argue is the intensely starry remains of one galaxy that has been consumed by another.

Astrophysics professor Aaron Romanowsky said it’s astounding how quickly his student may have discovered what “some people take years and never find.”

The stellar search was a welcome diversion for Sandoval, whose mother, Holly Houser, died of cancer in October. In the last years of his mom’s life, the physics major lived at home, juggling her care with his education, sometimes rushing her to the emergency room at night and dragging himself to class the next day from Fremont.

Months later, enrolled in his first astrophysics course, he learned classmate Richard Vo had discovered an unusual stellar object — possibly the densest ever found.

His reaction was immediate: “I want to find one too.”

With free, publicly available data from the Hubble Space Telescope archive and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Sandoval set to work on his laptop, combing the universe using some of Vo’s research methods. “I didn’t want to be sitting home, feeling sorry for myself,” said Sandoval, the younger of two brothers who both took care of their mother after her diagnosis. “That’s not what she would have wanted anyway.”

Instead, he and Vo are rushing to publish their findings with Romanowsky, a temporary staff researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz before joining the San Jose State faculty in 2012.

Romanowsky was on a team of astronomers from a number of universities that was among the first to discover a dense galaxy like the one Vo found: an ultracompact dwarf galaxy. They published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal in September.

But Sandoval’s search for a similar object turned up something “weird,” Romanowsky said, unlike anything he had seen.

If a dwarf galaxy is like an apple core, Romanowsky said, what Sandoval found is like the seeds.

They are keeping the names and locations of both findings secret until they have been published.

Their discoveries, though yet to be reviewed by other scientists, reveal what’s possible today in undergraduate science education, particularly at teaching universities like San Jose State that don’t have fancy equipment or massive research budgets, Romanowsky said.

One reason a pair of undergraduates might have pulled off this feat is that until recently, astronomers simply weren’t looking for these dense stellar systems.

“It’s something that’s been hiding in plain sight,” Romanowsky said.

If verified, their research could lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe — and of the black holes within galaxies, which have a gravitational pull so powerful they are thought to trap light, making them difficult to spot.

Both students were so passionate about the project, Romanowsky said, that they were pushing him, not the other way around. “They’re sending me emails at midnight: ‘Professor, will you send me more data?’ ” he said.

Experiences like theirs could bring more students into the sciences, said Natalie Batalha, a research astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center. Glimpsing something no human has ever seen feels like “all the mysteries of the universe are right there for us to discover,” she said.

“Not very many young people are choosing to pursue scientific careers,” she added, “and I wonder how much of that is because of stereotypes and a poor understanding of what it means to be a scientist.”

Between his forearm tattoos and outspoken, boyish sense of humor, Vo certainly shatters the boring-scientist stereotype. Recalling the start of his research project, he described the task ahead of him then as “basically finding Waldo.”

The youngest of 10 children of Vietnamese immigrants, Vo graduated from San Jose State on Saturday with a physics degree. He hopes to continue his research at San Francisco State.

Sandoval’s foray into astronomy makes him think of his mom. It always embarrassed him when she bragged about his physics studies, he said, because he felt he had done nothing special.

“After this has happened,” he said, “I’m pretty sure she’s proud.”

Photo via Flickr 

Teen Stowaway To Be Sent Back To San Jose After Jet Ride To Hawaii

Teen Stowaway To Be Sent Back To San Jose After Jet Ride To Hawaii

By Joseph Serna and Kate Mather, Los Angeles Times

Officials in Hawaii are preparing to send a Santa Clara teenager home after he reportedly stowed away in the wheel well of a jetliner departing San Jose.

Mineta San Jose International Airport officials said the 15-year-old managed to enter the airport, trek across the tarmac and climb into the Boeing 767’s rear left wheel well undetected and “under the cover of darkness” sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning.

The slight teenager, first seen on a security camera video, did not appear again until later Sunday morning, when airline workers spotted him 2,350 miles to the west, walking on the tarmac at Kahului Airport on the island of Maui.

The boy had run away from home, FBI officials in Hawaii said, and climbed aboard the jet without knowing where it was going. Though he could be arrested on suspicion of trespassing at the airport in San Jose, officials there say they aren’t planning on doing so.

Instead, authorities are busy trying to figure out how the teen so easily gained access to the jet and how he survived a perilous, 5 1/2-hour odyssey — enduring frigid temperatures, oxygen deprivation and a compartment unfit for human habitation — with so little apparent trauma.

Authorities said the temperature at the jet’s cruising altitude of 38,000 feet could have dropped to 50 degrees below zero or lower. Oxygen would have also been in painfully short supply at that altitude, about 9,000 feet higher than the summit of Mount Everest.

FBI spokesman Tom Simon said the boy apparently had been unconscious for the “lion’s share of the flight.”

Such ordeals do not usually end well. Those who do not fall to their death can be crushed by landing gear or succumb to cold and lack of oxygen. Federal Aviation Administration records show that of the 105 people who have stowed away on flights around the world over the last 67 years, 25 lived through the ordeal, a survival rate of 23.8 percent.

“He must have had the four-leaf clover in his hand or something,” said Jeff Price, an aviation security expert at Metropolitan State University in Denver.

Aviation security experts said it was troubling that the teen was able to bypass security and get to the plane undetected. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, said he wanted more answers, adding that the incident “demonstrates vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.”

Federal Transportation Security Administration officials said they planned to meet with law enforcement and airport authorities to review security after the incident, which experts noted could have been catastrophic had the stowaway been armed with explosives.

Officials said the teenager apparently had no malicious intent. The flight, carrying 212 passengers and 10 crew members, took off at 7:55 a.m. Sunday.

Soon after the plane landed at 10:31 a.m., airline workers spotted the stowaway and reported him to airport security. A Maui News photo showed him some time later sitting upright on a gurney, attended by paramedics, apparently alert and showing no obvious signs of his ordeal. He wore a sweat shirt with an orange hood.

Airport personnel in Hawaii said they had turned the boy over to Hawaii’s child protection office.

Shyb via Flickr