Or naval vessels.
What gets me is that the seal that connects the toilet to the plumbing is just a hunk of soft wax. No need for space age materials when you can just smush a wax ring out with the weight of a 100 pound ceramic throne.
Kudos to the wax-ring inventor and the “s” trap dude. Fairly simple ideas that work great and haven’t really been improved upon.
I’m a little late to this thread, but I just want to say that I recently did major renovations on a house.
It’s a stressful process:
There are many,many problems to be overcome, and huge bills to pay to contractors.You invest massive amounts of energy and time. You lose time from your job causing strain with your boss, and you spend too much time with the spouse( arguing about colors and fabrics), causing strain to your love life.
But I want to proclaim loudly and proudly:
Never once, not for a single moment of time, did I worry about how much the toilets weigh. 
How very profound!:rolleyes:
I want to echo **chappachula **- having done a major upgrade of the entire lower floor of our house, which involved literally months of umm-ing and aaah-ing over kitchen and bathroom items, it never even occurred to me to wonder how much the toilet weighed. Size, colour, shape, positioning in the room, integration with the desired cistern arrangement, delivery from the vendor, coordination with the sink choice - of a long long list of considerations, weight of a fixed in-house lavatory simply did not appear. As far as I can remember, weight wasn’t even shown in the catalogs.
Has it occurred to you that this is considered a non-issue by pretty much the entire rest of the world? i.e. no-one other than you gives a crap?
Installing a toilet stable is not always simple either, floors are often not very flat, and there are usually just two little bolts holding the thing down. The weight and rigidity of porcelain make it easier to stabilize.
Also about the plastic - show me anything made of plastic with 1-2" thick walls. The volume of plastic we are talking about here is huge.
That Gizmodo link mentions that Stainless toilets would feel very cold, since steel conducts heat very well. If not for that, I have no doubt there would be designer stainless toilets available, the same way there are stainless appliances. (Maybe there actually are, I didn’t check.)
I had a plastic toilet when I lived in Florida. If it wasn’t plastic, it was something besides porcelain.
It stained quite frequently. I hated it.
No way–many more. I’ve been at public events where people line up all day to use a “potty,” for many days in a row. The units don’t break down there!
Actually, I think Japanese bathrooms are specifically built to be hosed down in a similar manner. Kitchens in the other parts of the world are also built this way, negating the need to wipe them down!
Do you want a guest who weighs 400lbs using your pretty good plastic toilet or your completely proven ceramic toilet?
How often do you need to move a bathtub or shower? Yet those are more often made of plastic nowadays. And the lids of toilets are most commonly plastic, too.
You mean you crap out a window?
The old ways are best.
But most people don’t shit in their bathtubs either, so the ease of cleaning is not as big a deal. Plus, tubs are much bigger than toilets, so weight might be more of a concern for them given the difficulty in moving one to install it.
You sit in a tub. You sit on a toilet. One needs a lot more strength than the other to support a person’s weight.
I’ve never seen a plastic tub, though. Not saying I doubt they exist, just I’m not sure they’re nearly as common as being said. Plastic (or something like that) shower stalls yeah, those I’ve seen. Can’t say if I’ve seen a shower stall that wasn’t like that.
Most? Most?
Most?
Hmm. Is it “Shit in the toilet and sit in the tub” or “Sit on the toilet and shit in the tub”? I can never keep that straight.
When we refitted our bathroom three or four years ago pretty much all the bathtubs we looked at were plastic. Fibreglass reinforced acrylic seemed to be the norm: http://www.bathstore.com/products/baths/all-baths/acrylic-baths