South Korean uni installs lavatory that pays out when you spend a penny A professor at South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), presumably fed up with students at the university flushing their money down the drain, has come up with a system that manages to reverse that action. Cho Jae-weon, UNIST's professor of urban and environmental engineering, has created a …
"Users of the toilet scan a QR code on the cubicle wall with their phones, which links to a digital wallet containing their Ggool balance."
How so last century? Surely they should install Bluetooth beacons for the app. And then the bog could weigh the "product" and recompense accordingly, possibly on a sliding scale such that those taking a dump in the morning that they should have done at home, get paid less than those taking a more unavoidable dump later in the day.
It's not a septic tank at all.
Septic tanks are just one step up from a cesspit. While a cesspit makes no effort at all to treat waste, must be emptied on a very regular basis and isn't allowed to discharge at all, a septic tank contains bacteria that performs some minor breakdown of waste so that liquids can be discharged at an agreed rate. Separated solids still need to be emptied, but much less often than with a cesspit.
The bacterial breakdown does produce - among other things - methane, but no effort is made to capture this and it is usually vented to the atmosphere where it forms quite a potent greenhouse gas.
What the university seems to be doing is biodigestion, and for somewhere like a university with the potential to capture "outputs" from possibly hundreds of toilets, that seems like a good plan.
This is now being done at large scale in the UK, with many water companies passing effluient (if that's the right word) through biodigesters before final treatment, but the gasses produced are - of course - dangerous, as was proved at great cost in Avonmouth last year.
M.
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