Florida utility recycles old toilets into oyster havens

Tampa Bay Water is repurposing old toilets into a water-filtering oyster sanctuary, helping to offset the waste impacts from the utility’s growing rebate program. 

“We don’t want to create one environmental benefit, getting rid of old toilets, and then have a negative environmental impact through the waste created from the program,” said Amelia Brown, demand management program manager at Tampa Bay Water. “We want to enhance the overall environment. That’s part of our mission.” 

In 2020, Tampa Bay Water, located in west-central Florida, launched a rebate program to encourage customers to replace old, inefficient toilets with high-efficiency models. The program has steadily increased in popularity every year; in 2022, the utility issued almost 1,600 $100 rebates.

But all those toilets couldn’t be disposed of in Tampa Bay’s waste-to-energy incinerating facilities. Many were being taken to a landfill.  

“We started exploring what we can do here that’s a little better than junking up the landfill with all these porcelain toilets,” Brown said. She was familiar with other utilities that had crushed toilets and used the porcelain in concrete road base, so she started researching how the utility could replicate that effort in Tampa Bay. (Pictured above from left, Tampa Bay Water’s Amelia Brown and another staff member install an oyster reef ball made with crushed toilets; reef balls line a Tampa Bay shoreline; crushed recycled toilets help create oyster reef balls.)

That’s when she connected with Tampa Bay Watch, a nonprofit that promotes a healthy watershed through restoration projects, education programs and outreach initiatives. 

Among other restoration projects, Tampa Bay Watch builds 200-pound oyster reef balls out of marine-friendly concrete. Those concrete domes are then installed along shorelines to prevent erosion, and the balls’ nooks and crannies create space for young oysters to attach, growing into water-filtering powerhouses as adults. 

“They’re good for the bay environment because they filter and purify, and they also help break the wave energy from boats, thereby stabilizing the shore,” Brown said. “We had this crazy idea — what if we crushed down the porcelain from the toilet and mixed it into the concrete mixture?”

About 85% of the oyster habitat has been lost in the Tampa Bay area because of human activity, Brown said, and these oyster reef balls are a great way to help rebuild that population. So last summer, sledgehammer in hand, Brown and volunteers from Tampa Bay Watch crushed two old toilets to make four oyster reef balls. 

“Tampa Bay Watch installs hundreds of these in a year, so we thought, let’s put these two right along the shoreline and see how they do,” she said.

A year later, they’ve found the toilet oyster balls function just like the regular ones. 

“It was a success,” she said. “Now we’re looking to scale up the program.”

Organizers have had to navigate several logistical hurdles along the way. Hand-crushing hundreds of toilets isn’t feasible long-term, so staff had to find a large-scale commercial crusher to process the toilets.

Then they had to work with disposal companies on logistics and communicate with construction crews about separating toilets from other trash. 

“The dream is that one day all toilets are being repurposed,” she said. “But for now, we’re starting small and we really hope it will grow and take off.”

As news spreads about the toilets-to-oyster-ball project, residents have called the utility excited to help. 

“The whole idea of it makes sense to people and really captures their hearts and imagination,” Brown said. “They would rather their old toilet go to something special instead of to the landfill.”

Tampa Bay Water’s 2.5 million customers get most of their drinking water from groundwater, rivers and desalinated seawater, not directly from the bay, but projects like this underscore the importance of a healthy ecosystem.  

“This is about two environmental programs coming together to realize a mutual benefit. We both have a shared commitment to environmental stewardship,” Brown said. “It’s all connected. Everyone needs to take care to keep all of our water clean.”