Form Following Function?

Our company has installed waterless urinals in all of the men's bathrooms. They supposedly contain a non-miscible fluid that stays atop of the urine and forces it down. A cartridge change is required once a year. However, it seems as though it doesn't quite last as long as the urinal company advertises. On the other hand, they really do cut back on the water usage - and there is no odor.

could you just put glycerin in the cartridges or something else that floats?

like an ink cartridge refill for the toilet?

Good question! But I ain't goin' in there to find out!!!

water fees act to discourage this waste, but rich people delight in consuption.

possiblly sumptuary laws?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law

Mant business place outflow meters on their lones and save a lot of cash.

Most water and sewer bills are matching amounts. But that does not mean all that comes in goes back out.

Not necessarily, sewer can be based on flat rates, a percentage of the water utility fee, tiered, based on service connections or estimated load. Water is increasingly metered (required of all municipal water services in California). These are typically tiered and based on usage. Metering of sewage is more problematic and prone to error than water metering. Specific types of users who have large volumes of known waste disposal into saewers will sometimes meter these flows, but many municipal waste facilities do not deal with these industrial wastes, such as vegetable oils or canning waste, directly into the main treatment facility, but rather have pretreatment industrial waste units. (Smaller communities with smaller industries may still treat through wastewater plant directly, but typically have associated problems.)

Well several business placed outflow meters here on their lines and cut their monthly bill in half!

If the jurisdiction will capitulate to using meters on typical wastewater flows, then yes i would expect the flow to be measured much lower, particularly since in-line metering of sewage is prone to errors that read lower than actual flows. Some jurisdictions won't allow this as a means to reucing a utilities bill unless you can demonstrate a full range accuracy. Additionally, wastewater treatment is more complicated than water, so flows are not necessarily the only consideration that effects costs. One measure frquently used for industrial users along with the measured the flow volume from their facilities, is the BOD content. Also, they have to consider various constituents content, as these can cause the municipality serious regulatory issues at discharge.

The blog lead-off makes no sense; and it makes the purported urinal user seem confused as to what he actually saw while doing what he did. It seems he is squatting down in a public rest room in order to look through a urinal to see into rooms on the other side of a wall. No way to tell how he came to the conclusion that water was being wasted. So the blog has a smell about it.

What about a sink that uses the water you wash your hands with to flush the nearby urinals? soapy water is free .. nice smelling, and has no cartridge's..

nah... to easy.

What about all that wasted urine? Can't it be made into explosives or something?

Sure, just need to allow the urine to flow through some soil (or other innoculated medium) to be broken down over a couple of weeks into ammonium, then the ammonium needs to flow over some nitrifying bacteria for a few days to be converted to nitrate. Then recover the urea-ammonium-nitrate solution. Dry the solution, and mix with diesel fuel. Somewhere in the process you will want to remove the relatively high quantity of salts that are associated with urine. You are going to need a huge quantity of urine, since it is mostly water and salts, and a whole lot of soil with an underlying collection system.

You've done all this before, I'm assuming...

Well up to extraction. It is a typical undergraduate experiment in soil microbiology. You place urea in soil samples, allow it to sit for about 2 weeks monitoring the pH. When the pH goes acidic rapidly. You then extract the samples and analyze, you'll find nitrate in the extract. Of course the concentrations are nothing like you input for urea, since some of the nitrogen gets incorporated into bacteria. But you can get numbers like 200 mg/l concentration out.

same system they had on the ISS... until it broke