Raving Amicks

Good Design is Green

Most of my genius ideas happen in one of two places: while in the shower, and while bored to tears when waiting for the bus. On Monday, while I was bored to tears when waiting for the bus, I was hit by one of my genius ideas. The idea? I’m convinced that a key part of being eco-friendly relies heavily on good design. Dieter, take note (even though most of this is a joke).

I shall use my current place of employment as an example. I know, I know. It’s just too easy to poke fun at them since everyone knows their design is horrific—be it program interfaces or hardware. But don’t worry, I’ll take my example a step higher than the easy-to-make-fun-of products they create. I’ll take it to the women’s bathroom!

Let’s begin our journey at the very essence of the women’s bathroom: the stall. And more specifically, the toilet. Women, you see, have the misfortune of needing disposable paper toilet seat covers to do any of their business. And trust me, if you’ve seen some of the people I work with, you’d definitely not take your chances without the seat covers.

Herein lies the problem: the toilet seats at my current place of employment are sharply curved so as to point immediately inwards to the bowl. These aren’t the standard toilet seats found in a typical home, mind you. They are special poorly designed grade A utility seats. These seats are so special in their poor design that when I place said disposable seat cover on the seat, it slides down into the toilet bowl. I must then attempt to place another seat cover across that foul curved seat of environmental doom, trying to position it just right so it does not join it’s comrade in the bowl. If I’m lucky, this might work. Most of the time, however, the second cover will quickly slip down the angled seat and crumble into the watery abyss. And often the third. And sometimes the fourth. I must continue to place seat cover after seat cover until the covers already crumpled in the bowl provide enough of a buttress to keep the last one in place. Then, and only then, am I free to use the toilet for my bodily needs.

Think of all this waste! Anywhere from two to five toilet seat covers must be wasted before I can safely use the toilet!

Mathematical Voodoo

And now we’re going to think about this environmental travesty in a mathematical way. Here’s my line of thought in excruciating detail (there’s a summary at the bottom you may want to read rather than this):

There are roughly 10 women’s stalls in my building. The shape of my building is similar to the 10 original campus buildings, so let’s take the liberty of saying that all 105 buildings owned by my current place of employment have 10 women’s stalls per a building. That is 1,050 women’s stalls. Also, I know from my floor’s bathroom that all toilet seat packages are empty by the end of every two days. Let’s be even more liberal and assume that all bathrooms here follow this rule. There are 250 sheets per a package, weighing 1.4 lbs. Multiply the seat covers by the 1,050 women’s stalls and my liberal estimation is 262,500 covers used every two days. Or more specifically: 131,250 seat covers are used every day.

And now is where the fun stuff begins. Because I was liberal in my estimations, let’s be generous and assume that it only takes two toilet seat covers per a use. That would mean that instead of 131,250 seat covers used every day, we should be using only 65,625.

So, assuming that the average employee here works 40 hour weeks and has 5 weeks of vacation (they have a lot of vacation time here), that means that the average employee is working for 235 days. That means that 30,843,750 toilet seat covers would be used per a working year, versus the 15,421,875 that should really be used.

Okay, so using this source, and knowing that each package of seat covers weigh 1.4 lbs (minus the casing), and also knowing that the seat covers they buy are not environmentally friendly in process or materials (I’m just that bored at work), I can estimate that my current place of employment uses 86.3625 cords of wood for seat covers per year. In reality, they should be using half that: 43.18125 cords of wood. That means that they’re wasting 43.18125 cords of wood a year on seat covers because of poor design.

Even Voodoo Needs Summaries

To pare down the above mathematical tounges, here’s a summary:

• There are 1,050 women’s stalls using 131,250 seat covers every working day.
• If only one extra seat cover was used per a bathroom visit, then only 65,625 covers should be used per a working day.
• 30,843,750 toilet seat covers are used per a working year, versus the 15,421,875 that should really be used.
• 43.18125 cords of wood are wasted a year on seat covers because of poor design.

In the End, This Was Only About Toilet Seat Covers

This call to awareness doesn’t begin to scratch the nature of corporate waste. There’s the paper. And the toner. And the paper. And the computer equpiment. And the air conditioning. And then there’s the whole issue about the paper towel dispenser in my bathroom and how when I just want 2 paper towels to dry my hands, I end up with 10. One would almost think there is some sort of corporate consipracy for creating excess waste in our country! I’m so convinced that my current place of employment conspires against the environment that I am mildly aghast on a daily basis.

Good thing trees are a renewable resource, unlike oil and minerals.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 10:56 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.