Volume control: high-traffic restroom design

Building Operating Management, Jan 2005 by Windle, Lynn Proctor

Don't get Gary Brezinski started about Skoal cans.

After 18 years with the West Ottawa Public Schools in Holland, Mich., Brezinski, director of buildings and grounds, knows firsthand the problems a flushed Skoal can cause. It doesn't plug the toilet immediately, but when it does, it's a mess. A mechanical drain cleaner can move the can out of the way - temporarily. Eventually, the fixture must be pulled from the wall, and the obstruction fished out by hand.

For decades, school washrooms have borne the brunt of students bent on destruction. But it's not just school restrooms that must endure heavy traffic every day, and still look good and perform well, week after week, year after year. Like schools, transportation facilities and entertainment venues face stiff challenges in balancing image, cost and performance in restrooms.

The West Ottawa school district has 8,000 students and more than 1.2 million square feet of space including about 200 restrooms. An additional 335,000 square feet will come online next fall when a new $38.8 million high school opens. "We define restroom performance by its ability to handle a large volume of people and by our ability to keep them clean," Brezinski says.

When the new high school opens, its restrooms will feature the sum of Brezinski's experience.

Ceramic tile at least eight feet high is the wall covering of choice. Exposed plaster surfaces will be painted with epoxy, making them more resistant to moisture. Marble will be used for partitions. Not only is marble less expensive and more attractive than competing materials, Brezinski says, but it's hard to mark with graffiti, hard to break and, again, easy to clean.

Salt-and-pepper or marble-look surface patterns beat out solid colors when it comes to defeating graffiti. Black is the worst color. Students will write on black with an eraser and no cleaning solution and no amount of scrubbing will get it out, he says.

Tamper-proof touchless technology will be used as much as possible so that water runs only when it's needed, making it harder to flush foreign objects or to stop up sinks with paper towels.

Brezinski hopes to further reduce temptation by replacing paper towels with high-efficiency hand dryers that can dry hands in 10 seconds. He'd also like to replace conventional urinals with the waterless version, but he hasn't been able to do that yet.

"Waterless urinals are not an easy sell in K12 when funding is tight," Brezinski says. "The maintenance staff doesn't like changing the cartridge. But they do work. You can't plug them up. You can't hurt them. We hope they'll gain more acceptance."

Self-contained pressurized washing systems are one thing Brezinski can't live without. They have cut restroom maintenance by more than half. "When we started using them, the complaints went away," he says. "The smells went away."

Brezinski believes that using better materials upfront will reduce costs in the long run, even though they might be more expensive initially. "We looked at where we cut corners in the older restrooms, and it was very easy for the administration and the business people to understand we need better products," he says. "They saw that we had to redo restrooms when materials didn't hold up."

RESTROOM UPGRADES

By the time students leave high school, they've typically outgrown the graffiti stage, and image and cleanliness become more important.

Carl Costanza, director of facilities of Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, 111., is in the process of redoing every single restroom on campus. And for once budget is not an issue.

The 20-year-old restrooms had rusted metal stalls and partitions. Countertops looked their age. Students had no conveniences like bookshelves. To make matters worse, not one restroom was ADA-compliant - another important reason for the project.

So far, four of the buildings' 10 restroom pairs have been made over at a cost of $90,000 apiece. Solid-surface counter tops have replaced Formica, and plastic partitions have replaced the rusted metal. Individual mirrors over each sink have replaced the wall-length mirrors, which were difficult to replace when damaged. More shelving gives students places to put their books - a specific request from students, Costanza says.

Like Brezinski, Costanza believes in ceramic wall tiles. "Ceramic tiles have made a huge difference in appearance," he says. "The nicer the place looks, the less chance people will beat up on it."

Auto flushers have been installed to improve hygiene, although they require vigilance to make sure rundown batteries are replaced on time. Lighting controls and other touchless technologies have reduced costs and germ worries.

"This is the only facilities project where we didn't worry about costs," he says. "The administration made a commitment to have nice restrooms."

A TRANSPORTATION HUB

Located between Dallas and Fort Worth, DFW International Airport is the third busiest air transportation facility in the world. When its new 2 million-square-foot International Terminal D opens next summer, the facility will be able to handle 37,000 passengers each day.