A super weird conversation with ChatGPT

Let’s begin with the end: a celebration!

With your tireless support, we have collected

14,838 poops

and

2,245 gallons of pee!

That’s a lot of poop and pee in our toilets and not in the community!

That’s also a pile of poop the size of three refrigerators and enough pee to fill 45 bath tubs!

But how do we know that? We don’t track every use of our toilets, and we certainly don’t ask every user whether they pooped or peed and how much. (That would be invasive and gross, not to mention impractical.)

To find the answer, that’s where we have to go back to the beginning….

Last month, you came on a tour of our compost setup. What we didn’t show you there is all the data tracking that goes along with those compost additions.

Each time our employees or volunteers add receptacle contents to our compost piles, they log that addition in a Google Form we’ve customized to fit the needs of each toilet.

For each location, they note how full both the receptacle bin (from underneath the toilet seat) and the jug (from underneath the urinal) are. Some people do this at each stop, some like to keep the bins and jugs in a certain pattern on the trailer so they can keep track of which is which, then enter all the data back at the compost site.

Our spreadsheet then takes over. It has preset algorithms that total up all the partially full bins and jugs from each location so that we know our overall count.

Okay, cool. We know how many bins full of poop we’ve collected over the year, but what good does that do us?

That’s where ChatGPT comes in.

Okay, so not the first time isn’t always a success. Plus, now we’ve got a very descriptive image stuck in our head.

Let’s refine our question….

Much better! We’ve got an average volume we can work with now: 5.1 fluid ounces.

But poop isn’t the only thing taking up space in those receptacles. What about toilet paper?

Now we’re getting somewhere! We know that the receptacles mostly contain poop, sawdust, and toilet paper.

(There’s also sometimes clothes or other garbage, but we remove those and dispose of them before documenting how full the receptacles are, so the count is just for the full volume of a bowel movement.)

We use the same receptacle bins in all our toilets, and so have a standard we can measure with. We also start each bin off with a layer of sawdust at the bottom and encourage users, employees, and volunteers to add sawdust after each use.

There you go! If you ever wanted the visual of how many poops would fit in a 24 gallon bin, you now have it.

Most of our users use the urinal when they pee, which helps us keep a separate tally of how many pees we’ve collected. (It also makes the bins much less sloshy, which is super helpful when carrying them.)

We can do the same math for the volume of an average pee and compare it to the volume of our 5.5 gallon jugs.

After that, it’s one last algorithm to add to our original spreadsheet, and we’ve got our tally!

Because it’s a living document that our volunteers and employees add to each time they collect bins or jugs, we have an up-to-date count of how much poop and pee we’ve kept off the streets, and an average of how many uses our toilets have provided.

Every one of those poops got collected and each person who used a TE toilet got to because of your support. We want to make sure to keep you updated on how big a deal that is, and so we’ve installed an up-to-date counter on our website. It’ll always be there for you to see what a big difference you’re making, both to the community at large and to each of those users in particular.

Thank you so much for your unflushable commitment to make sure everyone has a toilet when they need one.

Read stories from people who didn't have the toilet they needed

This article originally appeared in our November 2024 Newsletter.