One of the constant struggles of Pedal People work is finding a place to pee. This is an issue for waste haulers and delivery drivers more broadly, but it’s especially bad with bicycle-based hauling, because of all the water one has to consistently drink to remain hydrated. Sometimes one is working near downtown where there are a few options, but what can be done if one is in a residential area all day? Covid made this situation much worse. We used to be able to go at the transfer stations (where we haul most of the waste), but both of these stopped allowing outsiders in the buildings, and probably never will again. We’ve made a list of places throughout town where one can easily access a bathroom (without having to purchase something, asking for a key, etc), but it shouldn’t be this difficult! Some of the options on that list include relatively secluded areas off of the bike path where one can pee in the woods. In one of my routes without such an area, I’ve taken to using a customer’s trash/storage shed to seclude myself while I try to quickly pee in a Gatorade bottle I bring with me. But options like this are of course even more challenging for those who have… different physiological configurations.
From this, we can see my extreme conditioning to only pee in ‘appropriate’ spaces. Like most people, I’ve had years of training in my formative years about this, which is now wrapped up into senses of shame and dignity. But this goes beyond just worrying what other people will think about my pissing location. This conditioning is so deep it affects me at a physical level. As in, even if I decided I don’t really care if I’m seen, I don’t think I’d be able to just pee into a sewer, or even into a bottle while in a more public area. I’d simply be physically unable to do so.
It’s like I’ve been set up with an impossible situation. I’ve been conditioned to only pee in these socially acceptable locations. Yet not enough of these locations exist. What am I supposed to do? I’m realizing as I write this how much mental energy I use every day about worrying when/where to pee.
And these ‘appropriate’ places are all about moving my fluids away as quickly and seamlessly as possible. The infrastructures make my pee waste, when scientists are finally ‘rediscovering’ the uses of urine as an effective fertilizer. The ‘responsible’ thing to do is literally piss this resource down the drain.
Most of the rural communes I lived at and visited had standard toilets, connected to a treatment plant or septic system. Some had composting toilets, whose droppings were usually used for non-agriculture plants, like the flower gardens. My experiences with these lead me to believe that modern toilets don’t actually save that much time and effort, and really are just a huge waste of water. Shoveling out the decomposed poop every several months wasn’t much different than shoveling soil: it had already decomposed, and didn’t smell at all. And if one didn’t want to do even that minimal labor, there are ways around that. The Possibility Alliance essentially built a small building with a toilet over a hole, and when it became full, they just moved the building, covered the poop hole with soil, let it decompose for a few years, and then planted a tree on it. These composting toilets were usually somewhat out of the way from residences, in standalone buildings, due to the varying levels of legality. (Like Pierre Leroux found in 1850s London, the State still doesn’t want us to use our shit as a resource.) But then one had to make the decision of using the convenient indoor toilets versus the slightly inconvenient outdoor ones, an easy choice in the winter.
Maybe I’ll ask the free garden I often bike by if they would consider making a composting toilet for the public. Then I could deal with a few of my neuroses in one sitting.