There are so many crises in our world right now.  Most likely, many of them are only a crisis because the media has told us they are a crisis.  In any case, people are talking about a water crisis.  The theory goes that with population growth and climate change, water is becoming more and more scarce and conservation is becoming a bigger and bigger issue.

I was at a client the other day and I had to use the restroom in their office commons area.  When I entered the toilet stall, the automatic toilet flushed.  When I was in the middle of doing my business, the toilet flushed again.  When I left the stall, the toilet flushed a 3rd time.  The toilet flushed 2 more times than necessary.  That’s pretty wasteful.  And that isn’t the only place where I’ve experienced that; I’m sure many others have noticed that too.  Let’s assume that 4 people use that toilet per hour in that office, 9 hours a day.  That’s 36 uses.  Let’s assume that it uses 2 gallons of water per flush, that’s 72 gallons of wasted water per toilet per day.  Further, let’s assume the 2 toilets in the restroom are used roughly 250 days a year at that rate.  That’s 36,000 gallons of wasted water every year. 

And that is just one office in one city.  I have no idea how many offices have malfunctioning automatic toilets or exactly how many cities there are in the U.S.  I read somewhere that, according to a census, there are about 19,000 “cities”.  Let’s go with that number.  And let’s assume that each city has just 1 office with 2 malfunctioning toilets.  That would amount to 684 million gallons of water wasted each year.  I think that’s a pretty conservative estimate  There are definitely more than 2 flush-happy automatic toilets in each city.

Let’s just do away with automatic toilets.  Maybe this is a very Libertarian idea, but let’s allow people to flush their own toilets.  Whoa, what a concept.  Everyone manages to flush their own toilet at home every day, so why not at work?  684 million gallons of water would be worth it every year.

On a related note, while I was in college, I was always fascinated by how busy the men’s restrooms were and the constant flushing of urinals.  30 people could realistically use a single urinal in an hour.  A normal urinal uses about 1 gallon of water per flush.  That’s 30 gallons of water/hour for a very busy urinal.  Much more likely though is that it’s less than that.  But I always thought, why don’t all these guys just stop flushing the toilet?  And every 15 minutes, or after every 10 uses, the toilet automatically flushes.  Some people would think this is super gross and that it lends itself to bacteria-spreading.  But urine that has been sitting for 10 minutes isn’t very different than urine that has been sitting for 10 seconds.  This obviously really only works for men’s urinals and not for women’s restrooms in any way.  I won’t even attempt to calculate how much water would be saved, but it would have to be a very, very large number.

So maybe this is a good conclusion: For all toilets, make them manual.  Flush when you’re done.  For busy men’s urinals, make them automatically flush every 15 minutes or 10 uses during peak use times.  During down times, enable manual flushing capabilities.

I think this would be a huge, easy first step in taking care of any water crisis that the media is talking about.  Obviously, it would require a small capital investment by the various businesses, governments, and schools to implement such a plan.  But the monthly savings would quickly offset the initial investment and would then begin providing a substantial ROI.

Last 3 posts by Eric

• Social Security Finally Bankrupt? - February 4th, 2010
• Business Cliches - January 15th, 2010
• Conan O'Brien - January 12th, 2010