Elemento-pee

I have been mulling over this whole sustainability thing over in my head for the last couple of weeks and I'm convinced that my role as a designer and building product specifier grant me an opportunity to be part of the solution rather than the root of the problem. I am positive that I can commit to sensible development and building practices while at the same time keep a roof over my head. This is a new direction for me gang and its novelty has been driving my entries in this blog of late. Eventually, I'll get back to pimping shiny objects. In the meantime though, I have a couple more things to think about the topic of sustainability.

My Road to Damascus moment was made possible by the great blog, Treehugger.com (http://www.treehugger.com/). Treehugger does a great job of marginalizing the lunatics who belong on the margins and bringing sustainable ideas into to mainstream. All the while maintaining a sense of humor and fun that's missing from most environmentalist screeds. Check them out.

There was an entry on their site today about pee. Since I waxed so eloquently about poop removal in my last entry, I thought I should give good ole number one some equal time.

The recent finding about pharmaceuticals in tap water supplies can be blamed pretty solidly on the fact that most of the drugs human beings ingest are excreted within hours. If we, as a society, found something to do with urine other than flushing it; there wouldn't be trace amounts of ibuprofen and progesterone in your drinking water.

In Switzerland, The Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology has been grappling with this what-to-do-with-pee dilemma and came up with the following:

While urine accounts for less than 1% of total waste water volume, it
contains 50–80% of all the nutrients in waste water. Many micropollutants, i.e.
residues of pharmaceuticals and hormones from human metabolism, also enter
waste water via urine. On average, for all medicines and hormones ingested,
60–70% of the active ingredient is excreted in the urine. 85-90% of the nitrogen and 50-80% of the phosphorus are concentrated in the urine. These nutrients are desirable in agriculture, but not in water bodies. It may therefore make sense to separate urine from waste water and use it for fertilizer production.

In New York this week, there's an exhibition at an art gallery called Eyebeam (http://www.eyebeam.org/) called drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee, It's provocative title is there to generate interest of course, but the purpose of the exhibit is to illustrate urine's role in the water cycle. It's not gross, so lighten up. Anyhow, one of the goodies in the goody bag at the door is a DIY kit to make fertilizer from your very own urine. Imagine! Get the nitrogen and phosphorous from urine out of sewer water discharges and it will end red tide in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hey, the Romans used it as laundry detergent.

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink

Yesterday's AP stories about contaminated drinking water supplies gave me pause. If you're living under a rock and missed yesterday's story here's the quickie re-cap.

The Federal Government studied, for the first time, the presence of pharmaceuticals in drinking water supplies in 28 metro areas around the country. This should come as no surprise to anyone. But of course it was met with the usual chorus of hand wringing and paranoia. The science of this scientific study will be cast aside in favor of quick fixes and feel-good policy changes. Lost in the shuffle will be the fact that there are no quick fixes and that there is even less to feel good about.

That study says as much about how precise the science of finding wildly diluted traces of substances has become as it does about the state of drinking water in the US. Someone pointed out to me recently that worrying about infinitesimally small traces of ibuprofen in my drinking water makes as much sense as worry about how much dog feces I'm eating every time my neighbor runs his leaf blower.

So if the traces of pharmaceuticals that show up in tap water aren't thought to be harmful directly, it's worth studying how they got there.

I read a study a year ago from the University of Washington that found elevated traces of cinnamon and vanilla in Puget Sound that peaked between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Who knows what, if any, deviltry those substances can get into when they're released into the environment. But that they're there is a canary in the coal mine if nothing else. Ditto the pharmaceuticals.

Modern sewage treatment plants trace their lineage to systems invented in London to get sewage out of the city and into the sea as quickly and unstinkily as possible. The sewage systems today still do the same thing, only now they filter out the poop first. This by the way, is the only thing they are designed to remove. Treated sewage with the poop removed is judged to be safe and then discharged into the nearest body of water. No one looks for anything other than the poop when judging whether or not the water is considered to be "clean enough."

Since poop is all that can be filtered out, anything that's not poop (and dissolved) is still there. Pour Drain-o down the sink and it ends up in the Bay a couple of days later. Flush away an expired prescription and you might as well be walking down the street and dumping it into the Gulf directly because that's where your Xanax, Ambien or Zoloft end up.

In Tampa's case, Tampa treats its sewage and dumps the "clean" water into the Bay. Tampa also has a desalination plant that sucks water out of the Bay and makes drinking water out of it. True, there's no poop in it anymore when it hits the intake pipes of the desal plant, but it still has its Xanax, Ambien and Zoloft. Cities not located near a body of salt water do the same thing only without a desal plant. Chicago dumps its treated sewage into the lake and then gets its drinking water from the same lake. What's that word again? Oh yeah. UNSUSTAINABLE.

That story yesterday will come as welcome news to the bottled water industry who already has the masses duped into believing that there is something inherently better about water in a bottle instead of water from a tap. This is a lie, a damned lie.

• 40 percent of the bottled water sold in the US is tap water with a brand name on it
• 1.5 million barrels of imported oil gets turned into those convenient plastic bottles every year
• Those plastic bottles can't be re-used
• US tap water is the safest supply in the world
• Bottled water is essentially untested and unregulated
• These bullets could go on for days and all of them would say that bottled water is a bad idea

What's the solution? A carbon filter for under your sink. Why is this a topic for a design blog? Look at this beautiful filtered water faucet!

Terrific terrazzo

Florida seems to be the land of the terrazzo floor. Or at least it used to be. I live in a part of Florida that was essentially built out by the mid-seventies, and the typical house in this part of the world is an 1800 square foot, cinder block ranch house. I remember being mortified by them when I first settled here but in time, the Florida rancher has grown on me. When the Florida ranch house was hitting its stride as a style, it marked the culmination of house building technology of the time.

Prior to the mid-'50s, houses built here were timber frame homes that sat on pylons about two feet off the ground. These frame homes had framed floors. For the most part; homes here don't have foundations. This is due to the proximity of the water table to the surface of the earth, and it's also due to the staggering volumes of rain water that fall during the rainy season. So without a foundation, traditional home builders here simply made sure that a home didn't sit on the ground. Around the middle of the last century though, somebody figured out how to pour a slab foundation from concrete and to build a home directly on that slab. Enter the Florida rancher.

Almost all of these sitting-on-a-slab ranch homes had terrazzo floors. Terrazzo is a flooring material that the Romans perfected and the terrazzo floors all over Florida are essentially the same thing the Romans used. A slurry of concrete and decorative stone aggregates is spread over a prepared surface and then the mixture is leveled. Once cured, the top layer of the concrete and aggregate mix is ground off; leaving a smooth, shiny floor with a distinctive pattern of random stone pieces in it. A typical, vintage terrazzo floor looks like the image to the left.

The native Floridians I know shudder at the thought of a Terrazzo floor. I think they're beautiful though. I suppose that people grow to resent what they grew up with and my native Floridian friends' bad reaction to Terrazzo is the same as my urge to vomit when I see hex signs or other Pennsylvania Dutch accouterments.

Traditional terrazzo is a labor-intensive and as building trade labor has become more valuable, the price of a new terrazzo floor became prohibitive and at some point in the mid-'70s, terrazzo was largely abandoned.

But terrazzo is making a comeback. It's starting to show up all over the place in public spaces and in private homes. The new terrazzo is a bit different than the vintage stuff and in a lot of ways it's a better deal. It's certainly less expensive. New terrazzo uses epoxy resins instead of concrete as a base. That's the first difference. In using an epoxy, the resulting floor is non-porous and highly stain resistant. Since the base material is manufactured and is essentially moldable plastic, it can be made in virtually any color. In a nod to the idea of sustainability, the aggregates used in the new stuff tend to be things like recycled glass and cast off stone from quarries. The new terrazzos have the same shiny stone feel of the old ones and they are virtually maintenance-free.

Since they are no longer being used as a cheap floor in mass-produced housing, the new terrazzos are as often as not designed and installed by true craftspeople and artists. Here are a few examples of this new terrazzo. In the hands of a competent professional, the sky's the limit. Or should that be the floor's the limit?

You can learn all about the new terrazzo floors and see some great examples of them in actual homes and businesses at the website of the National Terrazzo and Mosaic Association (www.ntma.com).

Mein gott im himmel! That's a stone mosaic!

The image to the left is a mosaic made by a San Francisco company called Exact Mosaics (http://www.exactmosaics.com/). It is an uncut tile mosaic made from 5/8" squares of natural marble.

I have never seen anything like this and I'm pretty much struck dumb by it. Exact Mosaics uses a pattern-recognition software to interpret a scanned image. The software actually selects the placement of the differently toned squares of marble that make up the whole piece. I mentioned yesterday that achieving curved shapes was something that was possible only with cut tile. Well, these people have found a way to do it with uncut squares and in a natural material to boot. Unbelievable.

The second photo is a close-up of the top left corner of the image and you can see the individual squares. The Romans mastered the art of the mosaic and since then, people have been using pretty much the same techniques. True, the Romans didn't have glass tile the way we do now, but even most glass tile gets used the way the ancients used colored stone. These guys on the other hand, have created something entirely new. Got to their website and gawk.

More more more mosaics mosaics mosaics

I had another big conversation with a client this afternoon about the wonderful, accessible world of glass tile mosaics. I am suggesting that this particular client forgo the usual accent wall in a great room and that she instead use a glass mosaic on that expansive wall. I cannot get enough of glass tile mosaics, and seeing them used on a huge scale is a thrill beyond compare. Please excuse my hyperbole.

There's a company in Oregon called Hakatai (http://www.hakatai.com/). Hakatai sells mosaic tile by the truckload, they sell to the public and will do custom work using fine-cut, cut and uncut glass tile.

Uncut glass tile mosaics use the same size square tile over their entire design. A lot of times, uncut mosaics stick to geometric patterns. However, by varying the colors of the individual tiles, a mosaicist can convey an alarming amount of detail and subtlety. Uncut mosaics are interesting because they only look right when viewed from a short distance.

Simple cut mosaics rely on the square mosaic tile shape for the lion's share of their form, but use cut pieces of those squares to add shapes to a design a mosaicist can't achieve with small square --usually curves.

Fine cut mosaics are the most complicated and labor-intensive of these three categories. they abandon the square tile shape all together. Cut mosaics don't rely on distance for you to be able to see them. They look as good up close as they do from far away. My friends at Hakatai will make you a custom, cut mosaic based on a supplied photo or other image too. Love Van Gogh's "Starry Night?" Do you have a pressing need to have it rendered in glass tile in your foyer? Talk to the kids at Hakatai.