Urban recycling: not a bad (unironic) beer in the box.

-->A recycling station housed in an old factory building might not seem like a novel concept, particularly in a city with a plethora of underutilized or vacant industrial space.  Like Detroit.

And even the appearance of it—a pastiche of industrial chic, street artistry, found objects, and, yes, even a pretty extensive panoply of bins of reusable materials, all monitored by reliably bearded and tattooed staffers—is probably closer to the mental image of what community recycling could, or should, look like.  “Taking out the trash” isn’t just utilitarian and mundane; it’s fashionable, eye-catching and even sorta fun.

Despite my evocation of hipster clichés, Recycle Here! feels like a novelty, at least in part because it’s among the few ways that residents of the Detroit can divert their discarded objects from landfills.  Long notorious as the largest city in the country without a municipal recycling system (both elective and compulsory), Detroit has also striven to find creative ways to curtail the illegal dumping that took place on its copious vacant lots—much of it recyclable material. A group of Wayne State University students founded Recycle Here! in 2005 as a response to the obvious dearth of options serving Midtown, then as today an emerging neighborhood with visible signs of homespun reinvestment.

As smart as the initiative was, it couldn’t easily both fund itself and support a demand that clearly stretched well beyond Midtown.  By 2007, the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Program (GDRPP) began funding Recycle Here! as the City’s de facto recycling center, all while expanding its outreach by offering additional drop-off days, a broader array of recyclable materials, and satellite locations elsewhere in the city.  In addition, the partnership has allowed curbside recycling pilot programs in three neighborhoods: Rosedale Park, East English Village and Palmer Woods/University District—with intention to grow throughout the city in the long-term.  The Michigan Municipal League website points out some of the other accomplishments: a growth of over 50% each year since opening; a non-profit spin-off called Green Living Science that has educated Detroit Public Schools on recycling initiatives; a for-profit arm called GreenSafe that sells recycled products to major consumption events, like Detroit Lions games. 

Even if it’s essentially an arm of city government, the Recycle Here! facility never for a moment feels like one.  The loudspeakers churn out tunes from a diverse array of genres, no doubt reflective of the eclectic taste of whoever is in charge at that moment.  On the busiest days of operation (typically Saturdays), a local vendor offers cheap French press coffee, and various food trucks tote their comestibles in the outside parking lot.  Another staffer sells screen printed t-shirts, virtually all of them featuring the ingenious and ubiquitous Recycle Here! bumblebee logo, designed by local artist Carl Oxley III:

And the bumblebee receives its share of competition from the other sculptures and murals that form a consistent backdrop to the more utilitarian goings-on up front:

If it isn’t already obvious, Recycle Here! has achieved what it ostensibly needed to do in order to ensure survivability: it evolved into a smartly-branded community gathering place.  And it’s a good thing it works so well: the process of recycling here is far from hassle-free.

Yes, the bins separate Styrofoam peanuts from other types of Styrofoam.  Visitors also have to hold all their plastics up to the light to see if the etching indicates a #1 or #2 (one bin) or #3 through #7 (a separate series of bins).  And cardboard gets separated from office paper, which in turn has a separate bin from newspaper, as well as glossy paper.

And less common materials need separating too.

Clear glass could contain a lot of items: salad dressings, pasta sauce, artichoke hearts, pickled pigs’ lips.  But colored glass usually captures a discrete family of consumable products.

Booze.  These days, varietals of wine do not delineate social strata that easily; even a few highbrow wines might reach the dinner table in a cardboard box.  But it’s very easily to distinguish consumers by the type of beer they drink.  And the beer bottles at Recycle Here! overwhelmingly fit a certain category: the non-corporate.

Whether it’s a microbrew from the Upper Peninsula or a Singaporean IPA, the beers being recycled here are the opposite of what about 85% of America drinks.  No watered-down Coors, Michelob, Budweiser.  The only beers found in the bins that would pass as mainstream working-class Americana are Pabst Blue Ribbon or this Miller High Life, like the one strangely perched, unopened, on the rim of the Clear Glass bin.

In other words, hipster beers.

Probably I’m going out on a limb by making inferences about cultures by the type of beers they consume, but not really, or at least not enough.  I don’t think we witness a dearth of Budweiser bottles because Detroiters simply don’t drink cheap beer.  I think the beers we see in these bins broadly reflects the ethos of people who go out of their way to recycle, and in Detroit, “going out of the way is” precisely what most people have to do.  In short, the act of recycling not only requires the active involvement of driving to the facility (at least for everyone outside those three affluent pilot neighborhoods), it also requires extensive separation once you get there.  If you have two boxes to deposit, it could take you over an hour to get it all done.   The staff at Recycle Here! makes the compelling argument that their approach not only ensures more material gets successfully recycled than if it all gets lumped together, but it also encourages the population to become more invested in the process.  While this may be true, it almost undoubtedly also scares off a huge contingent who simply doesn’t want to be bothered.

Thus, Recycle Here! succeeds because there are enough Detroiters, favorably disposed toward urban living, educated enough to have some disposable income, and predominantly left-of-center, all of whom at least value the idea of sustainability in its various incarnations: locally sourced food, fair trade or free-range growing practices, and non-corporate brews with higher alcohol content (and higher prices).  It fits like a hand in glove, and the fact that quality French press coffee gets served on Saturdays makes as much sense as the absence of a vendor selling McDonald’s, no matter how much Mickey Dee’s coffee has improved in recent years.  Through Recycle Here! and the pilot programs in those selective, higher-income, stable neighborhoods, the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Program has found the right niche to plant a seed.  It offers a confident start to set the trajectory for a city-wide recycling system.

Now if only they could figure out where all those bottles of Bud Lite are going.

And on the seventh day...He created a market.

With this article I venture into what may prove one of my most overtly political topics ever, possibly against better judgment.  Yet I wade into these waters as a deliberate challenge to myself, since I strive to separate the intensive political controversy that this tourist attraction elicits from what I think is more interesting and ultimately more cogent: the sustainability of its business model.  Despite being relatively new, this attraction has already lured millions of visitors.  Although tens of millions more have not visited (and have no intention of doing so), the heated debate generated from its opening in the summer of 2007 has inevitably foisted it further in the limelight than its conceivers had ever expected.

I’m referring to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in the outer reaches of suburban Cincinnati, just ten miles west of the Greater Cincinnati Airport (CVG) and also a two-minute drive from the I-275 bridge over the Ohio River that leads to Indiana.  The museum is (at this point in time) the highest-profile project of Answers in Genesis (AiG), a non-profit Christian apologetics ministry that principally advocates for a literal interpretation of Genesis.  Both the museum and its parent organization, now housed at the same address at the museum’s campus, owe a great deal of their size and influence to the tireless efforts of Ken Ham, who first founded a creationist organization in his native Australia in the late 1970s.  After several acquisitions and reorganizations that eventually whisked Ham across the Pacific to an American agency, Answers in Genesis was born, bringing together a smattering of creationist enterprises from the US, Australia, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand under one umbrella, all under Ham’s directorship.  In the intervening years, Ham has achieved national recognition for his tireless fundraising, which culminated in the $27 million of private funds to build the 70,000 square-foot Creation Museum—a goal of AiG since its inception.

Even among other Biblical creationists, the Creation Museum has aroused controversy.  It largely serves as the visitor-friendly, public relations arm of Answers in Genesis, which in turn concords with Ken Ham’s theological views.  Ham is a Young Earth Creationist (YEC), meaning that he believes that God created the earth according to the account in Genesis, approximately 6,000 years ago.  Not only does this defy fundamentals to Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, it also boldly contradicts most geological or cosmogonal studies of the age of the earth and the origin of the universe.  Thus, when compared with competing perspectives such as Old Earth or progressive creationism, whose proponents have also publicly debated Ham and AiG, the Creation Museum is probably the most at odds with contemporary scientific inquiry.

AiG’s creative team could have tried to accommodate other creationist views to expand its audience base, but they wisely decided it wouldn’t be necessary: Young Earth Creationism aligns with the views of a sizable portion of American Evangelical and conservative Christians.  According to a 2012 Gallup Poll, 46% of Americans surveyed believe that God created humans within the last 10,000 years—a percentage essentially unchanged since the polls began 30 years prior.  Thus, the Creation Museum did not need to cast a wide net in order to find its demographic base.  Initial speculation was that the Museum would see 250,000 visitors in its first year, but it ended up achieving that number within five months.  Almost immediately, AiG began planning to double the size of the parking lot, along with a retention pond to capture stormwater runoff, preventing it from flooding or polluting a nearby creek.  By the end of that first year, the Creation Museum welcomed over 400,000 visitors.

The photos featured throughout this article are no longer all that current; they’re from the summer of 2009, when the museum was about two years old.  The Creation Museum seems to be operating on a trajectory that involves steadily expanding its programming and amenities, though it already seemed extensive during my visit.  A few paragraphs back, I consciously used the word “campus” to describe the site, and while the word may be an overstatement, the museum is more than an isolated building.  The park-like grounds are extensive.

Aside from the outdoor seating, the museum’s property features an huge garden, a rope bridge, and a petting zoo.

Though I’m hardly well-versed in landscape architecture, it was obvious that AiG had invested considerably in both the design and the regular maintenance of these grounds.  The results were, at the very least, pleasing to my own two peepers, but I have no idea if Ken Ham and his team intended for these grounds to feature plant species indigenous to northern Kentucky, or an approximate recreation of prelapsarian Eden, or something else.  There was no way I could know.  The entire garden lacked any signage referring to plant species, Biblical relevance, or anything that would explain context or rationale.  It ostensibly existed simply as a treat for the senses, adding to the attraction for a museum that, thanks to the combination of the exhibits and the outdoor amenities, could easily consume an entire day for visitors.  Since the museum sits in the middle of former farmland, with no other commercial presence nearby, it needed something for its patrons to eat during their visit.  And, characteristic of the largest children’s museums, it offers an entire food court.

Since my 2009 visit, Answers in Genesis has added 20 zip lines and a network of 10 sky bridges to the museum, making it the biggest course in the Midwest. http://www.wcpo.com/news/zip-lining-among-new-attractions-at-the-creation-museum

Inside the museum, the curators have added a new section on dragons, based on the supposition that the Bible’s reference to “behemoths” might not just be describing the museum’s much-celebrated dinosaurs but also other mythical creatures that could have existed before the flood.  But these newest features only further beg the question: what do dragons and dinosaurs (not to mention zip lines) have to do with the story of creation, or anything explicitly referenced in the Bible, for that matter?  These inclusion are entirely within AiG’s right, but its hard to see them as corresponding with the organization’s ultimate ministry.  If visitors pay for the museum’s outdoor element and spend all day on zip lines, how are they having anything but a secular experience?  Instead, the attractions outside of the museum’s walls are ostensibly new goodies to enhance the museum’s ambition as a day-long (or even multi-day) destination in an of itself, rather than a museum that amuses the kiddos for 2 or 3 hours.  Ken Ham smartly located the Creation Museum sufficiently close to several important metros: besides Cincinnati, we have Lexington, Louisville, Dayton, Columbus, and Indianapolis within a two-hour drive.  But when I visited, the license plates often came from much greater distances than the tri-state region.

It would seem that the Creation Museum has succeeded overwhelmingly in its aspirations; after all, by April 2010 it was celebrating its millionth visitor.  But a closer scrutiny at those numbers suggests that all is not well.  After all, if it attracted over 400,000 after one year in operation, which equates to May of 2008, shouldn’t it have reached the one million point at some point in late 2009 if those numbers continued to surge?  The fact is, after a booming year one, the attendance has dropped in each subsequent year. http://citybeat.com/cincinnati/article-26546-creation_museum_atte.html The year ending June 2012 reported attendance at 254,000—barely over the original expectations.  The museum blames the persistently weak economy, which surely does have something to do with it—except that the museum opened just months before the Great Recession, and its most successful first year transpired while we were watching Lehman Brothers and Countrywide Financial collapse.  And AiG’s response to sagging sales was to raise the ticket price in July of 2012: from an already steep $24.95 per person up to $29.95.  It seems like some of those new attractions may reflect AiG’s realization that the Creation Museum is in serious trouble if it keeps moving along this path.  It’s declining faster than a Mainline church.

The response?  Answers in Genesis boldly announced its latest project: a $73-million replica of Noah’s greatest achievement, in the Ark Encounter, under construction about 40 miles away from the Creation Museum in Grant County, Kentucky.  In addition to the ark, it will apparently feature a replica of the Tower of Babel, the life of Abraham, the plagues of Egypt, and the birth of the nation of Israel—all as part of a seven to eleven-minute ride.  But it’s facing a few snags: the project is years behind schedule and has only raised about one-fifth of its budget, and the delays are pushing the estimated total budget up to $150 million—almost six times the cost of the Creation Museum.  The situation is so dire that the neighboring City of Williamstown has issued $62 million in bonds in an attempt to salvage the initiative.  Fortunately the city won’t have to repay these bonds back, since anticipated revenues for Ark Encounter will do the trick.  But these bonds aren’t rated, making them little more than junk.  Among the risks to investors: sicknesses transmitted among the ark’s many animal pairs; lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of a religious project receiving tax breaks; those persistently declining attendance figures at the Creation Museum.

None of the aforementioned news featurettes fully underline why the Creation Museum and perhaps Answers in Genesis are possibly in such serious trouble.  The ministry’s current struggles ultimately foreshadow a cultural misalignment.  When news of the Ark Encounter made its way to some of the Evangelical Christian newsmedia outlets, it understandably elicited reaction, both favorable as well as a fair share of atheist catcalls.  One quote caught my attention: an anonymous commenter who I have no way of finding or reaching; otherwise I would give credit.  I simply copied and pasted the comment.  Here it is:

“What I find so amusing about this whole project is that... Christians don't seem to realize that by giving their Bible stories a Disney like experience... they are essentially highlighting the very mythological basis of their faith. In my opinion for most Christians the [Old Testament] is an out of sight out of mind type thing (because Christians don't actually read the bible) so by bringing focus to these stories in a modern scientific context... only the extremely delusional are going to find the encounter "spiritual" everyone else will gauge the experience by the entertainment value for the dollar...the same as visiting any other cartoon based amusement park.”

Obviously this quote isn’t lacking in condescension toward Christians in general and creationism in particular.  I don’t condone it one bit, nor does it reflect my own sentiments.  I would experience no Schadenfreude if Answers in Genesis were to go bankrupt; it’s obvious the Creation Museum had quite an impact on the tourist economy of northern Kentucky, and it has generated hundreds of jobs for the region.  It would be callous to wish all of this to fail, no matter how dubious the museum’s attempt to reconcile contemporary scientific inquiry with the first book of the Old Testament.  For all the criticism lobbed at the Creation Museum for branding itself as science/history, it suffers no shortcomings as a religious museum, and my philosophy is overwhelmingly laissez-faire when it comes to addressing what matters of faith parents wish to impart on their children—in contrast with what our tax-supported public schools teach.

That said, the comment above nails it in the in the final sentence or two.  Answers in Genesis may have sealed its own demise by embarking on this basic undertaking.  The more goodies it crams into the overall experience and the more it blurs sacred and profane, the more obvious it become that the business model echoes that of Disneyland, regardless of the original intentions.  And if it becomes just another amusement park, even in the eyes of its most ardent Evangelical Christian supporters, it’s not going to be able to sustain itself, because the museum really will end up competing with places like Disneyland (or King’s Island in the Cincinnati area).  Meanwhile, since it does give “their Bible stories a Disney-like experience”, it will make new believers out of exactly nobody.

The other major aspect of the Creation Museum that I think hints at its questionable long-term viability is a simple display sign that, at the time of my visit, was poised strategically near the exit.

Okay, so the kids love those dinosaurs, and you can never go wrong with letting people pet the animals on display.  But is that enough for people to come back—let alone multiple times in a single year?  It would be interesting to know how many annual passes the museum sold even in its wildly successful first year, and, for that matter, how many families actually used those passes.  Color me cynical, but my suspicion is that low sales on the annual pass should have offered the early warning sign.

Over its six years in operation, the Creation Museum has expanded its programming.  But it has never reported any change to its exhibits—a huge contrast with most children’s museums (which are typically heavily science-themed) or most amusement parks.  These attractions recognize that exhibits must come and go all the time in order to keep the overall experience fresh.  Sometimes children’s museums will simply update their exhibits to reflect breakthroughs in scientific discovery.  But the Creation Museum is based on the unchanging Word of God.  It cannot evolve; pardon the pun.  Thus, what incentive do parents have to go back and see it all over again, especially when the museum is trying so hard to serve as a destination for families coming from hundreds of miles away?

When Answers in Genesis opens its Ark Encounter (if it opens), the whole enterprise very likely will benefit from a surge in attendance.  But how long before the Ark Encounter replaces the Creation Museum as the premier Biblical attraction of Northern Kentucky?  Can AiG sustain both, especially with those prices?  And what adult or child is seriously going to want to return within the year, just to experience the exact same spectacle all over again?  All of this ministry’s herculean efforts—and colossal spending—may just become the next incarnation of Heritage USA, the largely forgotten South Carolina Christian theme park that exploded in popularity in the early 1980s, then crashed almost as quickly after America learned of the peccadilloes of its founder, Jim Bakker.  I would never want to analogize Ken Ham to a convicted felon.  But barring a tremendous shift in American culture that has little to do with growing percentage claiming “religion: none”, the quixotic Australian’s empire may prove even more short-lived.

Plugging the passed-over pocket park with programming.

My latest post is up at Urban Indy.  It scrutinizes a small park on the near northside of Indianapolis--a park so unremarkable that most of the city's residents have probably never heard of it.  Wedged between the Fall Creek Place neighborhood and its namesake Fall Creek, Kessler Park is hardly an unattractive park.  Clean, easily accessible, generously landscaped, and boasting part of a creekside greenway trail, the park has everything an urban park needs...except people.

It's empty nearly 100% of the time.  What seems to be the problem?  The surrounding neighborhood is, at least by Indianapolis standards, relatively high density and pedestrian friendly.  But, at the same time, the neighborhood is not so crowded that the houses lack private yards.  Meanwhile the nearby Ivy Tech Community College campus brings students to the area, but it's overwhelmingly a commuter school, so the numerous daily visitors don't translate to much pedestrian traffic.  And this park--named after George Kessler, the designer of the city's park system--remains ignored.

What could the park's designers--or Indianapolis Parks and Recreation, for that matter--have done to make Kessler Park succeed?  Obviously it hasn't yet found the competitive edge that could make it at least something better than an oversight.  The designers seem to have thought that the park could become desirable on its own terms, so they didn't integrate any sort of programming or specific use into the site plan.  We see the results.

A counterpart in every sense of the word is Campus Martius Park in Detroit.  It might seem like an odd analogy, since this park sits in the heart of the Motor City's downtown, compared with Kessler's tucked-away spot along a residential street.   But Campus Martius does enjoy some obvious advantages; for starters, it's among the most lively civic spaces in this beleaguered city.
 
The park, re-established several years ago on what had previous been a sterile and unnecessary traffic circle, has a little bit of everything: a fountain centerpiece, a war memorial, the Fountain Bistro restaurant, a lawn with chairs for viewing concerts, the stage to host those concerts, and even a beach and a cabana bar.  Even when downtown Detroit is devoid of a good crowd (which can happen on any given weekday after 6 pm, unless a Tigers Game is taking place) Campus Martius park is still generally humming.  But could all that programming be a little overkill?

The goal of the article is to scrutinize the idea of programming our urban open spaces with destination-type venues, in order to lure the public.  Although this technique seems to be working at Campus Martius, such intensive cramming of activities into little more than an acre robs the space of its spontaneity.  People aren't enjoying the space on its own terms; they're responding to the many sales pitches it has to offer.

Ultimately, the programmed park reaches unprecedented extremes in they city of Yerevan.  This Armenian capitol took its circular beltway--designed as part of the master planned downtown during the early Soviet era--and has sold off the majority of the land to cafes and restaurants.
 
Most of Yerevan's parkland is completely commercialized, to the point of compromising its accessibility.   Bicyclists, for example, must find another outlet, since the extensive Circular Park is overwhelmed by vendors and small businesses that crowd the pathway.  It almost looks like an amusement mark. 

Where does this leave Kessler Park in Indy?  Obviously the current, unprogrammed condition isn't working, but it should avoid the opposite extreme from Detroit and Yerevan as well.  Truly visionary landscape architects recognize that a great urban park doesn't simply offer restaurants, pseudobeaches and other novelties--they should reveal sensitivity both to the landscape and the green space demands of the surrounding community.  In short, exactly the sort of park designed by George Kessler and his contemporaries.

The full article at Urban Indy provides far greater description and numerous photos of all three city parks.  As always, comments are welcome, both here and on the Urban Indy site.

"Trash to treasure" writ large.

My latest is up at Urban Indy, featuring the local nonprofit People for Urban Progress (PUP), and numerous photos of their many accomplishments as they approach five years in operation.  Always an urban advocacy group (as the name suggests), People for Urban Progress has taken a refreshingly non-partisan route by simply intervening when a building gets demolished by salvaging some of the bulkiest material for eventual re-use and redistribution.  Among their earliest but most enduring accomplishments is the salvaging of the massive material to the roof of the old RCA Dome, which was demolished in 2008.  How did People for Urban Progress decide to use 13 acres of Teflon-coated fiberglass?  The agency transformed it into handbags, wallets, clutchers, and so forth.  Tons (literally) of the material remained, and now PUP is transforming it into canopies for shade structures at various urban garden plots like the one below:

In addition, PUP intervened when a developer seized the old, long vacant Bush Stadium, to be converted into creative new apartments.  But what about all those stadium seats?  Since they were designed to withstand the elements, up to 9,000 of the 11,000 chairs were still salvageable.  And People for Urban Progress saved them, beginning to convert them into bus stop seating like the one below:

The blog article explores these and many other initiatives from People for Urban Progress in much greater detail.  Comments as always are encouraged.

Taking the sewer less traveled.

It probably doesn't seem like the most savory topic, and it's already my second blog post to reference the porcelain god. But wastewater removal is such a fundamental infrastructural component to sustaining dense developments that it is impossible to ignore or make light of it. For nascent settlements in resource-poor parts of the globe, it could just as easily be the critical prophylaxis against a cholera epidemic. As an instructor of mine once said from a class on housing in developing countries (in her thick Germanic accent): “It all comes down to where de shit flows.” Middle and upper income communities usually have sophisticated enough infrastructure that diverting the sewage away from housing is not a great concern; that process is already fully in place. Instead, wealthier countries can maximize the efficiency at which they convey effluent for treatment and dispersal. For this reason, I should not have been as surprised as I was when I first encountered this toilet at a latrine in central Afghanistan, taken (along with the three subsequent ones) by Beau Sheffer.

Nothing special, of course, though certainly spiffier looking than the rest of the latrine.

For those who have no basis of comparison—which, I suppose, is the majority of the civilian world—this latrine is pretty standard looking, in that it's somewhat tired and battle scarred (presumably only figuratively). My suspicion is that it is at least a decade old, with the predictable accumulation of graffiti over that duration of time. The frame of this modular sink/toilet unit has seen better days, but the toilets themselves are brand new.

The writing is too small to see, but tucked in the back of the seat is the brand name: American Standard. Timeless, renowned for its craftsmanship, and ubiquitous in both private residences and commercial restrooms across the nation. A truly classic toilet. It may have long ago surpassed its resilient top competitors, Kohler, Eljer, and my personal favorite, Bemis. But the operation of this latrine hardly complies with run-of-the-mill American Standard toilets. The clue should be the flush lever. Why is it green?

The symbol to the left of the green lever should provide a clue, but if it doesn’t, a sign on the wall above the toilet and shoulder-height explains more thoroughly.

These are dual-flush toilets, in which a push of the lever in a certain direction controls the amount of water flow used to flush the waste down. It appears the dual-flush apparatus comes courtesy of Sloan Valve, a company specializing in water-saving plumbing technology. As the diagram illustrates, an upward push of the lever releases a standard amount of water of 1.6 gallons per flush for solid waste, while a downward push initiates considerably lower flow, at less than 1.0 gpf, since far less is usually necessary for liquid waste. The intention through this innovation in toilets is to manage the minimum water level necessary to get everything down, thereby saving water for instances when the high consumption levels aren't necessary to elicit a good flush. Over the long-term, water consumption—and the ensuing utility bills—should be noticeably lower.

Dual-flush toilets have become particularly popular in parts of the world that struggle with continued water scarcity. Not surprisingly, Australia first introduced the technology over 30 years ago and has adapted to it more readily than just about anywhere else. Aside from the amount of water employed in a flush, the other large distinction between dual-flush toilets and conventional ones is the siphoning process. When a large volume of water enters the toilet bowl and overflows the exit pipe, it essentially creates a vacuum, which pulls the effluent down during the flush until air enters the process, thereby arresting the siphoning. (A likely more eloquently worded description of the process can be found here.) While standard toilets use this siphoning action, dual-flush toilets employ a larger trapway (the hole at the bottom of the bowl) and a wash-down flushing design that pushes waste down the drain. No siphoning action is involved, and the larger diameter trapway makes it easy for waste to exit the bowl without depending on such a large volume of water. (Discover Company provides a more detailed description.) Conventional toilets until recently have used as much as 5 gallons of water per flush—an incredible waste in any climate, but particularly profligate in a dry one, such as Australia or Afghanistan.

This plumbing innovation has not caught on in the United States until quite recently, so it was quite a surprise for me to find it in an austere military milieu, especially considering that the approach to potable drinking water across ISAF (International Security and Assistance Force) is through individually portioned plastic bottles, which scarcely ever get recycled—and only if the receptacles labeled “recyclables” actually live up to their claim. In short, Operation Enduring Freedom is not seeking ecologically sound solutions to drinking water provision. However, the US military has been far more conservative in its use of all other forms of water—for bathing, cooking, and flushing of toilets, so resource conservation is not entirely foreign. All personnel are encouraged in most instances to take “combat showers”—3 minutes or less—to deal with the finite supply of treated, unpurified water that comes out of the taps in latrines. And it appears that the newer toilets are increasingly adopting dual flush technology to conserve more water. Even if the primary source of drinking water depends heavily on non-biodegradable containers, at least the infrastructure for non-potable water emphasizes a certain moderation.

I have now seen dual-flush toilets more in Afghanistan than I have in the United States, where my only encounter has been in an academic institution—and just one building out of many within this institution. I'm confident there are certain settings in the US where they are widespread, and their prominence is only likely to grow as they assert themselves as a sine qua non within any green building initiative. The US Green Building Council has long included Water Efficiency as one of its fundamental categories for achieving LEED Certified status within New Construction and Major Renovations. The embedded prerequisite of Water Use Reduction mandates that structures will “employ strategies that in aggregate use 20% less water than the baseline calculated for the building”, which, according to the USGBC's standards, is 1.6 gpf for commercial toilets and 1.0 gpf for urinals—exactly on par with the target volumes in dual-flush toilets. Beyond this fundamental requirement, a developer/project manager can earn additional points within the Water Efficiency category through two more credit topics. The first applicable topic is WE-2, Innovative Wastewater Technologies, which recommends that potable water use for building sewage conveyance must be reduced 50% through high-efficiency or even dry fixtures (waterless urinals, composting toilet systems), as a means of earning these additional credits. The second topic is WE-3, Water Use Reduction, which more or less takes the standards from the original Water Efficiency prerequisite and awards additional credits if water consumption can be reduced even further from the baseline, from 30% up to 50%, again through toilets, urinals, faucets, showers, or spray valves. Achieving the 10 Water Efficiency points may be enough to distinguish a LEED Gold-rated building from a LEED Silver. Clearly toilets contribute enough to overall water efficiency to feature heavily in any dialogue on green engineering and construction.

While the USGBC has probably achieved more in elevating the status of dual-flush toilets in the United States, they remain at this point a relative obscurity, limited primarily to commercial construction from the past decade or so. Most Americans have no idea how they work or that such devices exist. While they obviously enjoy a higher profile in Australia or countries with a robust heritage of energy efficient construction (Germany always first comes to mind), some of my recent travels suggest it may have also caught on in the fast-developing world.

This toilet from a higher-end Italian restaurant in the Jumeirah Beach Resort district in Dubai, UAE may appear exactly as one would expect in such a milieu. Typical of toilets in this part of the world, it uses a button to operate the flush, contrary to the lever most commonly employed in the US. And judging from the design of the button, it's a dual flush:

Obviously the smaller button on the right corresponds to the lesser water flow.

A public restroom in Turkey employs a similar strategy for communicating the dual-flush technology. My apologies for the poor photo quality, but it should still be obvious that the smaller button on the right is intended to flush liquid waste.

Turkey is home to what is largely believed to be the oldest flush toilet system in the world, in the ancient Byzantine city of Ephesus, seen below.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the Turks boast the latest in resource conserving plumbing infrastructure. Business owners throughout Turkey have in recent years engaged in a campaign to “modernize” restrooms away from the “squat” Turkish toilet, usually perceived as a cathole-in-the-ground and much maligned by Western visitors, despite its comparative simplicity, efficiency, and potentially superior sanitation. The interesting distinction about this toilet is that the structure that houses it is anything but new: it is the Pera Palace Hotel in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul, the definition of luxury for over 110 years, and allegedly where Agatha Christie devised one of her most celebrated mysteries, Murder on the Orient Express. An extensive renovation completed in 2010 most likely resulted in sleek new water-conserving toilets.

One remaining concern, however, distinguishes the American example in Afghanistan from the other countries and which the water conservation efficacy of these two dual flush toilets hinges upon: without an instructional sign, would the average user know how it works? I am not in a position to determine whether such toilets are commonplace in either of these two countries. I didn’t see too many other examples during these recent travels, though if I were to guess, I suspect dual-flush technology is far more common in the United Arab Emirates than in Turkey. Even if they are a sufficiently common occurrence that Turks and Emiratis know which button to push, it’s hard to imagine that too many foreign visitors would know how to react when confronted with both a small and large button, either in Dubai—where, on average, 80-90% of the population consists of expatriates, or this particular hotel in Istanbul, which targets moneyed foreign tourists, often from elsewhere in Europe or North America. And if these visitors use the buttons incorrectly out of ignorance, it would easily nullify any of the potential for resource conservation.

Thus, the real effectiveness of this campaign may boil down to semiotics. Just about any populist environmental initiative requires an outreach campaign to get people on board—the lack of basic communication would guarantee that even those with a genuine interest in conservation will remain in the dark. Dual-flush technology may currently be a pioneering effort in the US, the brains behind the toilet latrines in Afghanistan seem far better at gauging their potential user than the more elegant but less informative versions in UAE and Turkey. For the record, the one dual-flush toilet example I saw in the US also had an explanatory label.

Chances are strong that this blog post, which regards these dual-flushers as an obscure novelty, will seem quaint within five to ten years. Before long, water-efficient toilets will undoubtedly become widespread enough that Americans no longer depend on the signage to tell them how it works, which is already apparently the current condition in much of Australia (and most likely other countries as well). One day, the two buttons above the toilet—or the green up-down lever—will seem as natural and self-explanatory as the blue recycle bins with the Mobius Loop. However, we can never optimize resource conservation—it is a perpetual teleological process, raising the bar steadily over time. One can only anticipate that American Standard, or Bemis, or Sloan will devise a new machine in a few years to resolve the latest perceived inefficiency, and eventually that new device will supplant the dual-flush toilet, which will at that time seem archaic. Hopefully these innovators will be as savvy toward outreach and self-promotion as they are at engineering.

DUST: Pedology 101, Part II – Just add water.

In the first half of this post, I explored my limited familiarity of Afghanistan’s pedology—the physical characteristics of the soil that allow scientists to place regions into different taxonomies, governed at least in part by a variety of temperature and moisture regimes. Without using any more terms that strain my word processor’s spell check feature, I’ll focus this time on those physical properties from a more empirical angle. I have scores of pictures to show the vast array of characteristics that force us—at least here in Afghanistan—to be conscious always of the conditions of the ground we walk on. The analogies for Afghan soil are limitless: the oft-cited moon dust, talcum powder, Pixie Stix, cosmetics, beige cocaine, cement mix. Aside from the generally agreed-upon observation that the ground is quite soft to the touch whenever it’s dry, none of the descriptions are flattering. The mere tire tracks from a vehicle manifest the torripsamments with dunes condition; the treads of a tire don’t imprint themselves into Afghan soil; they just displace the powder together into little rounded piles. If people were to get their faces close to the ground and exhale heavily, those “dunes” would disperse.

As annoying as it may be to fend against the steady accumulation of dust/dirt particles indoors, at least it is generally harmless to wooden or plastic furniture. It poses a much more serious problem to the electronics needed for basic operations here.

I’ll admit that I’ve been remiss in cleaning my computer top, partly to make a point, so the environment in that photo above is a bit contrived. But imagine how long it would take to achieve this level of dust accumulation in most environments in the US. Here’s a co-worker’s desk:

And here is a more authentic depiction of dust patterns on a laptop that I use—one that I have cleaned with pressurized air about two weeks ago.

Compare the keys that are commonly used (most letters) with those that generally remain untouched (the function keys at the top row, or the letter Z) to see what even a couple days of accumulation can achieve. It has undeniably caused the demise of some expensive machinery, and I have no doubt that particles of soil effectively killed the camera I referenced in a recent post.

And yet these wearying images and descriptions are only indicative of the soil conditions in Afghanistan during the dry climate. When the soil is wet, which is often the case during the rainy season (running from late January to mid April), it offers an entirely different array of unpleasant burdens.

In early April, we received an early morning sprinkle over the course of maybe two or three hours, though never enough to justify an umbrella by most people’s standards. The photo above and several below demonstrate the aftermath. Sure, they're just puddles, but puddles wouldn’t typically form after a sprinkle, even accounting for the relative imperviousness of the gravel base. The conditions are far worse in other locations.

For the most part, the soil here does not support anything more than scrappy, intermittent herbs and grasses, which is the yin to this abiotic yang. If the earth grew more plants, their root systems would facilitate drainage, but since the soil’s percolation ability is poor—characteristic, no doubt, of the Psamment suborder mentioned earlier—most plants simply can’t grow. These helicopter views are poor quality, for which I apologize, but it still manifests the conditions in Afghanistan after a minor shower, which is generally all we get here:

It looks like a mud slide engulfed the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but this just shows the typical conditions after rain—an endless sheet of beige slime, punctuated by occasional grasses (but only during the spring growing season). Viewed from the ground, the ponding is much worse in one of the lower points of Bear Village, the American Army compound at Camp Marmal:

The poor folks who live in these tents have to deal with days of standing water; it only diminishes through evaporation, and in the peak of the rainy season (which this year was February) minor sprinkles occur every few days. Although the rocks would seem to impede drainage, the gravel bed is the only preventative measure to keep pedestrians from slurping through ankle-deep mud. Witness these slippery stairs nearby:

And the conditions on the less heavily graveled side of that wall:

Puddles emerge after even the mildest of rains—and virtually all rains in Afghanistan are insignificant, yet they are hardly ever inconsequential: the mildest ones still take at least a full day to evaporate, remarkable given the arid nature of the climate through much of the year. Drainage simply does not occur to any measurable degree. Thus, the German engineers who first broke ground at Camp Marmal several years ago decided to build a full array of drainage ditches, partially visible in this earlier blog post, to prepare for no more than a half-dozen modest drizzles over a four-month rainy season in the late winter and early spring. The rest of the time, those ditches will sit idle.

Thus, the engineers and planners for this base had to invest in a drainage system to prepare for a situation that usually occurs no more than a half dozen times each year. And many years the rainy season passes by without a real thunderstorm. It seemed like 2011 was going to be one of those years, but around the 10^th of April, just days before the anticipated end of all measurable rain, Balkh province in Afghanistan got pummeled. Well, not really: the storm was no more than a half hour of moderate rain; not enough to make people in Louisiana open their umbrellas. But it was significant enough for this arid country. The immediate aftermath of a shower at this scale is predictable, given the conditions of the soil:

Ponding is especially problematic in the back of these tents, where the HVAC systems and circuit breakers rest. Fortunately it didn’t appear too bad this time:

But it was more than enough to fill those roadside drainage ditches:

And elsewhere, the water just sat in pools atop the nearly impermeable mud.

It turned out this was just the prelude to our apocalypse. About an hour later, as the sky was fully brightening, we encountered this unpleasantness:

Water had come surging down the mountainside, accumulating velocity and volume as gravity took its course, so that the landlocked tsunami forced its way through the opening formed by the base’s Commercial Entry Control Point (ECP), continuing on down what used to be a road—a paved one, mind you:

At the next major intersection, the low point formed by two streets allowed the water to disperse…

…right into our compound.

Sandbags worked as valiantly as possible, but they were no match for these water levels, some of which easily topped a foot in height. The sandbags on the closest side of this tent were completely submerged.

Here is the front of our row of tents, after the flood had peaked and begun to recede:

And the back, where it mercifully appears that the Environmental Control Units (ECUs) weren’t badly affected:

While our one-acre compound bore the brunt of the flooding because of our proximity to the Commercial ECP, other parts of the base felt the impact as well. The large drainage swale, empty 96% of the year, came close to topping over.

Fortunately the engineering for this swale is superior to that of these smaller channels, which exceeded their capacity, resulting in some minor water intrusion in the back portion of the American gym:

Though the channel below looks unremarkable as a static image, the water had crested above its banks just 30 minutes earlier, and the flow speed at the time of this photo was still so fast that a person falling in would likely result in a drowning.

And, of course, combining all that water with the infuriating Afghan soil results in one ubiquitous condition: ankle-deep mud. The photos below show the conditions the next day, approximately twenty-four hours after the rainshower:

And inside the tents, which, at the time of this photo, were in the process of being dismantled:

It’s hard to capture depth or thickness of such a large planar surface with a camera, but let it be known that if one’s boots were not tied tightly enough, the suction of that thick stew would easily pull them off. After wading through it for just a few minutes, a person would come out two inches taller, with newly formed platform shoes.

It took three twelve-hour days to restore most of our compound, which truthfully was probably not a long time considering the vast amount of work to be done. It could have been much worse: no tent received more than 16 inches of water and, most importantly, no one was hurt. But it remains a curiosity to most Americans that it happened at all. The rain volume, even for a largely arid environment, were not particularly severe, and yet it elicited flash flood conditions at the base. My suspicion is that the intensity of the rain was much greater in the nearby Hindu Kush mountains, which would help to explain the deceptively large surge that came barreling down the slope and hour later. The change in grade also undoubtedly intensified the velocity at which the water tumbled down. But the soil remains the key player; its imperviousness contributed to both the volume and the speed of the run-off. By no means does Camp Marmal have the greatest drainage infrastructure: as mentioned in a previous blog on cost-cutting measures at military outposts, it's hard to justify the steep expenditures for a top-of-the-line flood prevention system at a base which its creators never intended to be permanent. Nonetheless, one can only imagine what the permanent Afghan population has to contend with during the rainy season: according to a report on the province of Balkh released by the Afghanistan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, only 49% of the province's households have electricity, 31% have access to safe drinking water, and only 12% can access safe toilet facilities. Incidentally, Balkh's standard of living ranks much higher than most other provinces in the country, thanks to the presence of a large city such as Mazar-e-Sharif. Within the urbanized areas in and around this nation's fourth-largest city, the above statistics are superior: 95% of households have electricity, 67% have safe drinking water, and 15% have safe toilets. However, like most of Afghanistan, Balkh is significantly rural, and remote settlements lacking good infrastructure are abundant. If systems for providing water are scarce or poor quality, it is reasonable to suspect that water removal and drainage are also less than advanced. We've experienced what happens on base during a minor rainstorm. How do the Afghans manage?

The soil in Afghanistan is a palpable impediment to the nation's citizens' ability to attain a higher standard of living. Those who live in cities like Mazar-e-Sharif still sometimes maintain garden plots outside the urbanized areas; the aforementioned report reveals that 40% of households in Balkh province depend on agriculture as the primary source of income, either through direct cultivation or trade. The parched climate and friable soil results in a remarkably short growing season for most grasses, suitable for the nomadic ethnic Pashtuns known has Kuchis, but undeniably a challenge for more permanently settled populations. Though the cultivation and consolidation of food no longer precludes urbanization in most developed nations, it most likely plays a role in Afghanistan's ranking as one of the world's most rural countries, with only 23% of the population living in urbanized areas. The dust impedes operationality of electronics, making it an unlikely place to attract foreign technological investment, a barrier further exacerbated by the incredibly low literacy rate (less than 30%, and barely 10% for women). The filmy layer of soil makes routine living for outsiders unacquainted with these levels of dust—which includes practically everyone—a constant frustration. It's miserable in the dry season and impedes visibility enough to pose potential problems for air travel, while eclipsing those mountain views much of the time. A person is never far from a spectacular mountain range, but he or she can often only see it half the year, as indicated by the visibility rates in the chart below:

My experience of southern Afghanistan around Kandahar was that it was even worse than Mazar-e-Sharif. Down there, everyone I spoke to felt as though the hands need washing every five minutes. And, of course, the rains, as rare as they are, not only elicit pools of muddy water in the best of times and catastrophic flooding at the worst, they render many of the roadways impassable—a tremendous problem in a region where only 38% of the roads can handle car traffic in all seasons. A mud-filled unpaved road is unusable.

Is there a region in North America at all comparable to Afghanistan? A superficial research of climatological patterns—an admitted problem when I understand northern Afghanistan's climate far better than my native country—suggests to me some parts of the US might share at least remotely similar pedological characterstics. The temperature and rainfall data for Mazar-e-Sharif in the charts below, as well as the previous visibility chart, comes from the Joint Meteorological and Oceanographic Climatology Segment from the Department of Defense. (I wish I had included this material in Part I of this essay, when I referenced temperature and moisture regimes, but at least I've managed to integrate it to Part II before it goes to post.)

In the US, from the information I could determine, the region that most closely mimics Afghanistan's alternating mountain/desert plateau topography falls, not surprisingly, in the West. But much of the Rockies receive far more precipitation, or the temperatures are far more consistently warm or cool than the extremes that Afghanistan experiences. The best that I could determine is that northern and central Nevada—a virtually waterless region that includes only a half-dozen counties (Humboldt, Churchill, Pershing, Lander, Elko, Eureka, White Pine) but covers a significant land mass (about half of the state)—may have soil that most closely resembles that of Afghanistan, in terms of the moisture and temperature regimes. However, north-central Nevada does not exactly meet the war-torn southwest Asian country's demographics.

While Afghanistan has a land area comparable to and a population somewhat larger than the state of Texas, northern Nevada (approximately 55,000) is virtually uninhabited. The largest communities in this region, are Elko, Fallon, and Winnemucca, which only total approximately 30,000 people. The famed U.S. Route 50-- “the Loneliest Road in America”--bisects the region. If it were to quintuple in size, which is about what it would take to be comparable to Afghanistan, it would still have fewer than a half million people. Afghanistan, by contrast, has a landscape more austere and certainly just as rural, but it claims a population of nearly 30 million. Obviously the distinguishing factors between northern Nevada and Afghanistan—which include birth rates, colonization histories, stability of governments, sovereignty and enforceable boundaries, among other things—are complicated enough to generate an entirely different article. Suffice it to say, though, that population distribution in the US has proven that, given the choice, a significant portion of America has not found northern Nevada suitable or desirable for settlement, where as Afghanistan's similarly unforgiving landscape hosts more people than any US state but California.

The soil conditions in this war-torn, remote—yet hardly unpopulated—country are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of impediments to long-term prosperity. By many metrics, Afghanistan enjoyed a higher standard of living under monarchy in the 1960s and 1970s than it does today. The Soviet occupation throughout the 1980s fostered an additional soil condition that prove a bigger onus to Afghan quality of life than any dust piles or flash floods: the land mines buried within. The statistics for the country are grim. According to the 2010 Landmine Monitor, Afghanistan had the highest number of casualties in the world, at 859—over 20% of the world's total. It is one of the five most mine-enriched countries, with an estimated 10 million total, so that every square mile of the country averages 40. The popular site Listverse estimates that mines kill or maim an estimated 10 to 12 people every day in Afghanistan. Fortunately, the country also benefits from some of the most intensive mine clearance initiatives in the world: Landmine Monitor reports that it ranked top globally in 2009 and the square kilometers of mine area cleared there comprise nearly 30% of the global total. Nonetheless, land mines will inevitably impede any other form of investment, until they are eradicated, which could easily take decades—while assuming that no other events will throw the demining process off course, or, inshallah, foster a new reason for planting land mines. This article may depict the living conditions in Afghanistan as bleak, thanks to its infuriating soil. However, the relics of war—and land mines are hardly a relic since they perpetuate a culture of conflict-related casualties long after a treaty has been signed—transcend most if not all of the intrinsic pedalogic features. Who knows—after the nation is liberated from its broadly scattered landmine catastrophe, maybe that moon dust will seem like small potatoes.