The taboo secret to better health | Molly Winter

322,312 views ・ 2016-09-02

TED


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Whenever I get to travel for work,
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I try to find out where my drinking water comes from,
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and where my poop and pee go.
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(Laughter)
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This has earned me the nickname "The Poo Princess" in my family,
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and it's ruined many family vacations, because this is not normal.
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But thinking about where it all goes is the first step in activating
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what are actually superpowers in our poop and pee.
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(Laughter)
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Yeah.
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And if we use them well,
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we can live healthier and more beautifully.
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Check out this landscape in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Just notice what kinds of words and feelings come to mind.
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This landscape was watered with treated sewage water.
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Does that change anything for you?
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I imagine it might.
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And that's OK.
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How we feel about this
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is going to determine exactly how innovative we can be.
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And I want to explain how it works,
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but what words do I use?
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I mean, I can use profane words like "shit" and "piss,"
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and then my grandma won't watch the video.
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Or I can use childish words like "poo" and "pee." Eh.
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Or I can use scientific words like "excrement" and "feces." Humph.
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I'll use a mix.
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(Laughter)
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It's all I got. (Laughs)
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So, in this suburb,
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the poo and the pee and the wash water are going to this treatment plant
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right in the middle of the community.
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It looks more like a park than a treatment plant.
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The poo at the very bottom of all those layers of gravel --
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not touching anyone --
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is providing solid food for those marsh plants.
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And the clean, clear water that comes out the other end
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is traveling underground to water each person's yard.
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So even though they're in a desert,
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they get their own personal oasis.
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This approach is called Integrated Water Management,
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or holistic or closed-loop.
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Whatever you want to call it,
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it's in conflict with the status quo of how we think about sanitation,
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which is contain, treat, push it away.
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But in this approach, we're doing one step better.
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We're designing for reuse from the very beginning,
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because everything does get reused,
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only now we're planning for it.
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And often, that makes for really beautiful spaces.
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But the most important thing about this system
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isn't the technicals of how it works.
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It's how you feel about it.
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Do you want this in your yard?
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Why not?
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I got really curious about this question.
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Why don't we see more innovation in sanitation?
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Why isn't that kind of thing the new normal?
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And I care so much about this question,
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that I work for a nonprofit called Recode.
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We want to accelerate adoption
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of sustainable building and development practices.
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We want more innovation.
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But a lot of times, whole categories of innovation --
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ones that can help us live more beautifully --
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turn out to be illegal.
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Today's regulations and codes were written under the assumption
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that best practices would remain best practices,
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with incremental updates forever and ever.
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But innovation isn't always incremental.
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It turns out, how we feel about any particular new technique
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gets into everything we do:
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how we talk about it,
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how we encourage people to study,
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our jokes, our codes ...
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And it ultimately determines how innovative we can be.
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So, that's the first reason we don't innovate in sanitation.
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We're kind of uncomfortable talking about sanitation,
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that's why I've gotten called "The Poo Princess" so much.
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The second reason is:
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we think the problem is solved here in the US.
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But not so.
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Here in the US we still get sick from drinking shit in our sewage water.
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Seven million people get sick every year,
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900 die annually.
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And we're not taking a holistic approach to making it better.
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So we're not solving it.
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Where I live in Portland, Oregon,
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I can't take Echo for a swim during the rainy season,
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because we dump raw sewage sometimes into our river.
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Our rainwater and our sewage go to the same treatment plant.
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Too much rain overflows into the river.
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And Portland is not alone here.
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Forty percent of municipalities self-report
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dumping raw or partially treated sewage into our waterways.
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The other bummer going on here with our status quo
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is that half of all of your poop and pee is going to fertilize farmland.
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The other half is being incinerated
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or land-filled.
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And that's a bummer to me,
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because there are amazing nutrients in your daily doody.
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It is comparable to pig manure;
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we're omnivores, they're omnivores.
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Think of your poo and pee as a health smoothie for a tree.
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(Laughter)
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The other bummer going on here
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is that we're quickly moving all the drugs we take into our waterways.
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The average wastewater treatment plant can remove maybe half of the drugs
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that come in.
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The other half goes right out the other side.
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Consider what a cocktail of pharmaceuticals --
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hormones, steroids, Vicodin --
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does to a fish,
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to a dog,
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to a child.
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But this isn't just some problem that we need to contain.
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If we flip this around, we can create a resource
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that can solve so many of our other problems.
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And I want to get you comfortable with this idea,
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so imagine the things I'm going to show you, these technologies,
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and this attitude that says,
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"We're going to reuse this.
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Let's design to make it beautiful" --
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as advanced potty training.
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(Laughter)
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I think you're ready for it.
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I think we as a culture are ready for advanced potty training.
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And there are three great reasons to enroll today.
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Number one:
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we can fertilize our food.
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Each one of us is pooping and peeing something
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that could fertilize half or maybe all of our food,
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depending on our diet.
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That dark brown poo in the toilet is dark brown because of what?
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Dead stuff, bacteria.
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That's carbon.
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And carbon, if we're getting that into the soil,
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is going to bind to the other minerals and nutrients in there.
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Boom! Healthier food.
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Voilà! Healthier people.
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Chemical fertilizers by definition don't have carbon in them.
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Imagine if we could move our animal manure and our human manure to our soil,
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we might not need to rely on fossil fuel-based fertilizers,
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mine minerals from far away.
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Imagine how much energy we could save.
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Now, some of us are concerned
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about industrial pollutants contaminating this reuse cycle.
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That can be addressed.
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But we need to separate our discomfort about talking about poo and pee
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so we can calmly talk about how we want to reuse it
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and what things we don't want to reuse.
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And get this:
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if we change our approach to sanitation,
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we can start to slow down climate change.
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Remember that carbon in the poop?
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If we can get that into our soil bank,
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it's going to start to absorb carbon dioxide that we put into the air.
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And that could help slow down global warming.
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I want to show you some brave souls
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who've had the courage to embrace this advanced potty training approach.
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So those folks in New Mexico --
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why did they do it?
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'Cause they're in a desert? 'Cause they save money? Yeah.
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But more importantly, they felt comfortable
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seeing what was going down the toilet as a resource.
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Here's an average house in Portland, Oregon.
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This house is special because they have a composting toilet
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turning all their poo and pee, over time, into a soil amendment.
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Their wash water, their shower water, is going underground
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to a series of mulch basins,
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and then watering that orchard downhill.
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When they went to get this permitted,
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it wasn't allowed in Oregon.
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But it was allowed in five other states nearby.
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That was Recode's -- my organization's -- first code-change campaign.
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Here's a great example where the Integrated Water Management approach
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was the cheapest.
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This is three high-rise residential buildings in downtown Portland,
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and they're not flushing to the sewer system.
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How?
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Well, their wash water is getting reused to flush toilets,
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cool mechanical systems,
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water the landscape.
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And then once the building has thoroughly used everything --
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aka, shat in it --
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it's treated to highest standard right on-site by plants and bacteria,
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and then infiltrated into the groundwater right below.
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And all that was cheaper
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than updating the surrounding sewer infrastructure.
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So that's the last reason we should get really excited
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about doing things differently:
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we can save a lot of money.
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This was the first permit of its kind in Oregon.
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Brave and open-minded people sat down and felt comfortable saying,
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"Yeah, that shit makes sense."
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(Laughter)
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"Let's do it."
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(Applause)
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You know?
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I keep showing examples
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where everyone's reusing everything on-site.
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Why?
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Well, when we look at our aging infrastructure -- and it is old --
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and we look at the cost of updating it,
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three-quarters of that cost is just the pipes snaking through our city.
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So as we build anew, as we renovate,
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it might make more sense to treat and reuse everything on-site.
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San Francisco realized that it made sense
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to invest in rebates for every household
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to reuse their wash water and their rainwater
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to water the backyard,
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because the amount of water they would save as a community would be so big.
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But why were all these projects so innovative?
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The money piece, yeah.
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But more importantly,
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they felt comfortable with this idea of advanced potty training.
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Imagine if we embraced innovation for sanitation
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the way we have for, say, solar power.
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Think about it -- solar power used to be uncommon and unaffordable.
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Now it's more a part of our web of power than ever before.
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And it's creating resiliency.
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We now have sources of power like the sun
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that don't vary with our earthly dramas.
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What's driving all that innovation?
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It's us.
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We're talking about energy.
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It's cool to talk about energy.
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Some folks are even talking about the problems
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with the limited resources where our current energy is coming from.
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We encourage our best and brightest to work on this issue --
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better solar panels, better batteries, everything.
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So let's talk about where our drinking water is coming from,
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where our poo and pee are actually going.
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If we can get over this discomfort with this entire topic,
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we could create something that creates our future goldmine.
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Every time you flush the toilet,
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I want you to think,
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"Where is my poop and pee going?
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Will they be gainfully employed?"
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(Laughter)
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"Or are they going to be wreaking havoc in some waterway?"
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If you don't know, find out.
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And if you don't like the answer,
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figure out how you can communicate to those who can drive this change
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that you have advanced potty training, that you are ready for reuse.
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How all of you feel
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is going to determine exactly how innovative we can be.
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Thank you so much.
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(Applause)
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