By Trevor McNally
A lot of folks don’t give a second thought to water scarcity. And why would they? Earth is the blue planet; 70 percent of it is covered by water.
But the fact of the matter is that most of that water is saltwater, and mankind has not- as of yet- come up with an effective, macro approach to water desalination. Which means that we have to rely on our freshwater supply. But therein lies the problem.
“Freshwater makes up a very small fraction of all water on the planet… only 2.5 percent,” according to National Geographic. “Even then, just 1 percent of our freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields. In essence, only 0.007 percent of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its 6.8 billion people.”
For these reasons, water-saving technologies like low-flow toilets are more crucial to the plumbing industry now than ever before.
Fortunately for us in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency created a program in 2006 called WaterSense which was designed to protect the future of the U.S. water supply. “Toilets, bathroom sink faucets, flushing urinals, shower-heads and irrigation professionals who have undergone training by WaterSense-labeled certification programs are all products/services that are readily available to consumers. Products that seek the WaterSense label must: achieve national water savings, provide measurable results, perform as well as or better than similar products in the same category, and be water-efficient, using at least 20 percent less water than EPA’s fixture-specific water use baseline.”
Not even factoring in any other products than toilets, the WaterSense program provides very real results. “By replacing old, inefficient toilets with WaterSense labeled models, the average family can reduce water used for toilets by 20 to 60 percent—that’s nearly 13,000 gallons of water savings for your home every year! They could also save more than $110 per year in water costs, and $2,200 over the lifetime of the toilets,” according to the EPA. “Nationally, if all old, inefficient toilets in the United States were replaced with WaterSense labeled models, we could save 520 billion gallons of water per year, or the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in about 12 days.”
So why not save money while saving the environment at the same time?