These Urinals Could Protect Bathroom Floors From 265,000 Gallons of Pee

Every day in the United States, about a million liters of rogue pee hit the floors and walls of public restrooms. That’s 264,172 gallons of piss splashing onto every surface in a bathroom other than the yawning mouth of a urinal.

A group of scientists publishing their findings in the journal PNAS Nexus think they’ve come up with a way to keep those 1 million liters of piss in the urinal where it belongs, and it all has to do with the design of the urinal itself.

The team has designed two new types of urinals that they claim will make sure all of that pee ends up where it’s supposed to be, and not leave you sloshing through it as you enter and exit the public restroom. Meet Cornucopia and Nautilus, perhaps the fanciest names ever given to something designed to be pissed in.

The researchers used high-tech methods—including a fake urethra nozzle—to figure out why peeing in public clearly lends itself to pissing on every surface other than the place pee is supposed to go.

While it’s easy to blame men and their terrible aim, the researchers say it has nothing to do with aim but rather terrible urinal design. “Urinals are a staple of public spaces yet their designs have remained essentially stagnant for over a century,” the researchers explain in their study.

Using fluid dynamics, the scientists discovered that pee hits differently depending on the angle. To significantly reduce splash back, the researchers found that a urine stream should be heading the urinal’s inner surface at less than 30 degrees. This small shift in design philosophy resulted in splashback levels being reduced to only 1.4 percent of the levels seen in regular everyday urinals.

The Cornucopia and the Nautilus both solve this problem with different style executions. Cornucopia kind of looks like a vertical computer mouse with a big upside-down isosceles triangle cut into it that has its pointy end tapering off at or around your nuts. The Cornucopia looks like a urinal I would expect to find in the IKEA head offices. It might be a little tall for children and the disabled. I wouldn’t expect to see the Cornucopia at the local bar and grill’s restroom anytime soon.

The Nautilus, however, seems like it has a better chance of actually making it into public restrooms as it accomplishes goal of getting men to splash their piss at 30-degree angles all while mostly looking like a traditional urinal. It’s long with steeply angled sides that curve out at around the knee or shin area to form a bowl. For some reason it reminds me of Sam the Eagle from The Muppet Show.

The researchers seem to agree. They say that if the Nautilus were to replace the 56 million urinals currently spread out across the United States, it would prevent 1 million liters of pee from splashing onto restroom floors while having the knock-on effect of saving about 10 million liters of water used to clean up all that pee every day.

For decades men have been failing to contain their pee within the walls of the urinal, walking away soaked in their piss from waist to foot, all while the solution to the problem lie not with us but with intellectually lazy urinal manufacturers who just needed to angle the sides a little bit. What a brave new world we live in.