LIFE IN THE DESERT

You see them on the curbs of Santa Monica, castoffs, rejects with no place to go. Orphan toilets. Since the city’s Bay Saver Program began two years ago, residents have been evicting their water-guzzling johns in favor of the ultra-low-flow models. By the end of this past summer, the city had shelled out $100 rebates for nearly 17,000 castoff commodes. The proliferation of toilets on city curbs seems to indicate that the program is working. City crews cart them off to a local crushing facility, where they are rendered into road base or pipe backfilling. But this fairly simple process is only the latest chapter in the case of the surplus toilet.

Santa Monica had originally intended to copy the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent experiment of dumping the toilets out in the bay to create a porcelain reef that would attract spawning fish. But after the city had collected about 1,000 toilets, the feds noticed that the latrines were deteriorating in the salt water--instead of saving the bay, they were polluting it. So, the thrones were schlepped to the only place big enough to hold them all--the Santa Monica Airport, where they served as lawn ornaments for several months until the crushing apparatus was on-line. All the kinks seem to be smoothed out, but the city should count its toilets before they’re crushed--there are about 60,000 more where those came from.