OAKLAND, CA — The largest soccer stadium in Europe, Nou Estadi del Futbol Club Barcelona, has 900 waterless urinals. Bank of America Tower in New York City has 200. The Rose Bowl Stadium, an early adopter of the technology, installed 259 in 2002. And the Universal City Hilton retrofit all its urinals with waterless fixtures.

O'Hare Airport had a few but removed them. Chicago pulled some of its waterfree urinals in City Hall and kept others.

What makes the technology popular in some places and not others, even in the same building? In many cases, it comes down to installation and maintenance.

Done properly, waterless urinals regardless of the maker can save thousands of gallons of water a year. Done wrong, they'll probably still save some water, but they're likely to stink.

What Users Say

Written comments on our earlier coverage of water-saving toilets, including waterless urinals, usually run neck-and-neck among users who like them and those who don't, with the biggest complaint being odor.

Green design and building sources we spoke to also lined up in two camps: Those who say the fixtures perform well when used and maintained properly, with opinions differing on whether maintenance is easy or hard, and those who view the technology guardedly -- neither endorsing nor rejecting it -- but saying that property owners have to keep their building occupants' habits and perceptions in mind when considering what fixtures to install in restrooms.

For example, a planning executive said that's why one of his company's premier sites has waterless urinals for staff and low-flow toilets in visitor areas. Public opinion about the devices have been mixed and, regardless of improvements in technology and design, his company didn't want anything to detract from the visitor experience.

GreenerBuildings.com asked Daniel Gleiberman, vice president of government affairs for Falcon Waterfree Technologies, and Randall Goble, the company's vice president of marketing, for their advice on the care and feeding of waterless urinals. The firm manufactured the products in almost all the instances described above.

Some 200,000 of the company's products, marketed by Falcon or its strategic partners, are in place around the world. About half are in North America. Each of the urinals can save as many as 40,000 gallons of water a year, says Falcon. Their customers range from school districts and municipalities to the U.S. Department of Defense, other federal departments and international airports in Beijing and Dubai. Each of the urinals can save as many as 40,000 gallons of water a year, says Falcon.

Gleiberman and Goble identified three success factors for waterless urinals:

• Installation
• Maintenance
• Education and Support

Installation

"A waterfree urinal goes into a regular plumbing system, but if it is not installed properly, you're not going to get proper performance," Gleiberman said.

Maintaining, or restoring, the necessary slope for the urinal line is a key part of the process. "An existing urinal line should have a 2 percent slope -- it's required," Gleiberman said. "But we know from retrofits that sometimes for flush urinals it was never there or the line had settled."

To address the problem, Gleiberman and Goble said Falcon developed "pipe-in-pipe technology" that comes with their products and is part of their adaptive drain coupler to ensure a downhill slope in the horizontal pipe nipple.

Installing the fixtures in appropriate pipe systems is also important. "We know that waterfree urinals and copper pipe systems are not optimum," Gleiberman said.

Next Page: Why Copper Pipes and Waterless Urinals Don't Mix, and Looking for Help from a Little Blue Shell