Gotten from Wired Magazine, July 2010. Credits below
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By Joshua Davis June 22, 2010 | 12:00 pm | Wired July 2010
In a laboratory 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, a mechanical penis sputters to life. A technician starts a timer as a stream of water erupts from the apparatus’s brass tip, arcing into a urinal mounted exactly 12 inches away. James Krug smiles. His latest back-splatter experiment is under way.
Krug is an unusual entrepreneur. Twenty years ago, he was a rising star in the film and television business. He served as a vice president of the Disney Channel in the 1980s and ran a distribution company with members of the Disney family in the ’90s. But 11 years ago, Krug became convinced that the world did not need another TV show. What it needed was a better urinal.
His transformation from Hollywood player to urinal evangelist began in 1999 at the Universal Studios Hilton in LA. A business acquaintance of Krug knew that he was interested in exploring new opportunities and arranged a meeting with Ditmar Gorges, a German engineer who fervently believed that flushing a urinal was a waste of water. Sitting in the Hilton lobby, Gorges gushed potty talk. He explained that he had invented a water-free urinal and pointed out that urine was already liquid and a generally sterile liquid at that. Gravity could drain it completely. No flush necessary.
Krug immediately grasped the implications: The German’s humble innovation had the potential to save millions of gallons of water at a time when demand for the natural resource was draining aquifers dry. It would do more than any film or TV show to solve a pressing problem. Krug decided to help.
Drawing on sales skills he’d honed at the Cannes Film Festival, Krug dived into the bathroom business. He formed Falcon Waterfree Technologies with Gorges and explained to anyone who would listen that the water-free urinal would save more than just water: In California, a fifth of the electrical output was consumed by processing and pumping water. Cutting water usage would reduce our carbon footprint.
Falcon wasn’t the first to develop a waterless urinal. A company near San Diego had been struggling to sell them since 1991. But Krug made a conceptual breakthrough: The real profits wouldn’t come from the urinals themselves. They’d come from selling the replaceable cartridges that sat in each of the waterless receptacles.
In a traditional urinal, water pools in the drain after every flush, preventing sewer gases from escaping into living areas. Gorges’ invention employed a plastic cartridge filled with a liquid sealant. Urine could pass through, but sewer gases remained trapped beneath the sealant no water needed. The $40 cartridge had to be replaced after 7,000 uses, turning a onetime urinal purchase into a perpetual income stream. Krug’s business model took a page out of the Gillette playbook: Keep the urinal cost low and lock customers in to buying the cartridges.
He quickly won converts. Cable tycoon Marc Nathanson made a substantial investment in early 2000, and in 2001 Falcon began to manufacture its urinal, dubbed the U1P. Soon Al Gore signed on as an adviser, and in 2006, Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay, made a significant investment. Krug was sure the world was ready for a better bowl there hadn’t been any major advances in urinal technology for decades but there was something he wasn’t prepared for: the plumbers.
Mike Massey didn’t like Krug’s urinal. As head of PIPE, a plumbing union advocacy group in Southern California, Massey looks out for plumbers’ interests. And as far as he was concerned, the waterless urinal was a threat to public health. Diseases might fester because the urinals weren’t being washed down with every use. Sewer gasses might leak through the cartridge. “People take plumbing for granted,” Massey says. “But the reality is that plumbers protect the health of the nation. That’s how we think of our job.”
Full story at Wired: http://current.com/1fnmo4c
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