SANTA BARBARA — Calle Real does not look like a street that has made history. It is just an anonymous frontage road, choked by weeds, beside U.S. 101 on the outskirts of Santa Barbara.

But crouch beside the right-turn lane near the bowling alley, study the asphalt, and you will see hundreds of tiny white flecks glistening in the sun--visible evidence that Calle Real was the first street in the country composed of ground-up toilets.

A road paved with toilets does not have the kind of cachet that will contribute to Santa Barbara's reputation as an upscale vacation destination. But among recycling experts, this Central Coast city is revered for taking 10 tons of discarded toilets and creating a road.

Since Santa Barbara revolutionized toilet recycling, Santa Monica and Marin launched their own programs and have recently ground up thousands of old commodes for road base. Now, dozens of other California cities are preparing to collect residents' water-guzzling toilets--exchanged for water-conserving models--and begin similar programs.

Water experts, faced with an increasing supply of old toilets, are now searching for even more uses for the crushed porcelain. The state Department of Water Resources is currently testing whether the material can be used in concrete. The San Diego Water District hopes to one day use the ground-up toilets for landfill layers. Other water experts are investigating whether the material can be used as mulch for landscaping or as roofing material.

Creating a road out of ground-up toilets is an amusing novelty to many people, but to California water officials it represents an important solution to a troublesome problem. During the last few years, as the drought worsened, residents have been encouraged to install low-flow toilets. Most of their old toilets were simply discarded at overcrowded landfills.

There are 19 million toilets in homes throughout California. The state's Water Conservation Planning Program hopes to one day replace every one with low-flow models.

"What do you do with 19 million toilets?" asked Deborah Braver, a manager for the state's water conservation program. "Without a way to recycle them, we'd just be solving a water conservation problem and creating another environmental problem--at the state's landfills."

Escondido is now considering building a street out of the pulverized toilets and officially naming it something like Commode Road or Calle El Bano, as an enduring reminder about the values of recycling.