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Comment by davidbanham | Hacker News Reader

> they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs

Same thing happened to waterless urinals. Those are still making headway due to the waterr saving benefits but it’s been a hard fight.

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That had nothing to do with plumbers.

They stink (and solutions to stop them stinking don’t work reliably), and they plug up plumbing with crystalized urine unless you also do things that don’t work reliably.

shrug

I believe the fix for that is to chuck a bucket of water through it once in a while.

My reference for the opposition to the urinals from plumbers came from this Wired article, iirc.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-fight-to-stop-flushing

We already have a technological solution to this problem that obsoletes the manual process of carrying buckets of water to the washroom.

Hah, based on what is being said there, it's not so much plumbers, as the building code agencies and union head. (think Doctors vs American Medical Assoc.). Which hey, that I could believe they'd push back a bit. But the code issues got fixed, and they got installed in a lot of places.

But they stink, and do have issues with crystallization of urine, and that's why I saw them ripped out after a year or two everywhere they got installed.

Like Buckminster, conspiracy theories are a lot more palatable reason for why your idea got shot down than it just didn't work well in real life.

That seems to make them no longer waterless though, doesn't it?

I don't think they lived up to the hype. I remember they would get clogged all the time. Most places that I recall having them returned to regular plumbing.

They're all over the place here in Australia. Personally I don't think I've encountered anywhere that's switched back from them. It's also very common to see traditional plumbed urinals converted over to waterless.

Here in California, our legislators wisely went with the jobs-preserving solution of requiring that a water supply be plumbed adjacent to every waterless urinal (then capped off).

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=523829...

IIRC, this remains code with force of law today. Reference to the authoritative text is however problematic, keyword search being behind a paywall:

https://codes.iccsafe.org/codes

This policy too helps support high-paying jobs, in IT.

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