The Perils of High Altitude Pooping

Passengers may flush an airplane toilet a thousand times per flight. I guess you'll have better things to ponder, but have you ever considered where all that poop goes? In the early days of flight, the answer was simple — it went straight down, with zero processing and zero concern for people or property below. 

This mattered less if ground zero coincided with the rhubarb patch in your allotment. It mattered more if the random contents of a stranger's bowel a mile above you hit you on the neck and slithered down the back of your shirt. Luckily, such events were rare.

They are rare but best avoided in the interest of public hygiene. And so airlines invented a toilet which used powerful blue-coloured deodorising chemicals to flush waste away. But if waste products no longer ran down the back of ground-dwellers shirts or fertilised their rhubarb, it still had to go somewhere.

The 'somewhere' was in storage tanks situated directly below the toilets. From there, unwanted smells tended to waft up into the cabin above, putting passengers off their in-flight meals of quiche and new potatoes and had them grasping for the barf bags.

And if those aloft had it bad, those below hardly got off Scot-free. The air temperature at 30,000 feet is -48F. That's low enough to freeze solid toilet waste (a delightful mix of faeces and blue gloop) that occasionally leaked to the outside of the fuselage and that airlines call 'blue ice,' a substance that sounds straight out of Game of Thrones.

Chunks of blue ice sometimes broke away from leaky vents, hurtling to earth at terminal velocity. A baseball-sized lump of this stuff could demolish a greenhouse like a bunker-buster bomb and it's doubtful that home insurance covered victims back then.

As with all things, the designs for airline toilets progressed. Airline boffins developed improved systems, employing disinfectant and a suction device powerful enough to suck the wool off a sheep. Activating the flush of these toilets opened a trapdoor and sucked waste products to the rear of the aircraft, where they were stored in sealed containers. On landing, special trucks siphoned off the waste and disposed of it in the airport's primary sewage system.

Thanks to science, the perils of high-altitude pooping have been banished. Greenhouses, in-flight meals and shirts lie beyond harm from evil odours and the dreaded blue ice. So if you're reading this while sitting in the garden of a house directly under the London Heathrow flight path, for example, there's no need to tilt your eyes fearfully upwards because no one has ever died from being struck by falling blue ice.

As we bid farewell to the high-flying hazards of blue ice, it's comforting to know that back on solid ground, our choices can be kinder to the environment. Uranus Wiper's toilet rolls, made from FSC certified bamboo, are septic tank friendly – a small, eco-conscious choice for your everyday comfort.