Crap and Trade
What? You've been giving away your urine for free?
All these years, you've been sitting there like an idiot—or standing, or squatting, or whatever it is you do—pissing away a perfectly good liquid asset. Turns out, you could have sold it.
Many of us haven't just been giving our waste away; we've been paying to unload it. Hundreds of cities have automated public toilets, known as APTs. In New York or Los Angeles, you drop in a quarter, and the door opens. But your quarter hardly pays the bills. New York's new APTs reportedly cost more than $100,000 apiece; Los Angeles' cost $300,000; Seattle installed five at a cost of $6.6 million. At 25 cents a flush, 20 to 130 times a day, a toilet brings in only $2,000 to $11,000 per year.
In Los Angeles, the facilities are part of a 20-year contract between the city and a joint venture of two companies: CBS Outdoor and JCDecaux. The latter, a French firm, has installed thousands of the sleek units worldwide, mostly in exchange for the right to sell the ads that adorn them. It's a common model that is used by the majority of American cities looking to install the loos. L.A. is guaranteed $150 million in revenue over the course of the contract. … The companies foot the bill for installing all the structures, including the toilets, and for the maintenance on each.
So the company pays the city, and in exchange, the city provides eyeballs. The eyeballs are yours. Do you get a cut? A free flush, at least? Nope. You pay.
The obvious argument for making you pay is that you're getting a service, too: a clean, private place to relieve yourself. If you can't find a john, you'll have to go in the street. But why is this your problem? Why isn't it the city's problem?
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