Environmentally Friendly Toilets for Your Home? Yes, There Are!

Toilets are an essential part of every home whether you have one shared bathroom or two or three bathrooms throughout your home. They help safely control and dispose of human waste. However, conventional toilets tend to waste a lot of water. Older toilets use six gallons of water to flush the waste down the drain.

Consider a family of four, who on average flush the toilet six times each throughout the day. This amounts to 24 flushes and 144 gallons of water each just to use the bathroom. Now, if the family were to replace their existing water-wasting toilets with new environmentally friendly toilets that only use 1.6 gallons per flush, they could help conserve water.

With the new eco-friendly and water-saving toilets installed, now this family of four only uses 38.4 gallons of water each day to flush their toilets. This is a 105.6-gallon reduction in water usage. Over the course of a year, this family would help conserve and save 37,171.2 gallons of water! In addition, they would notice a major reduction in their water bill each month since they were using less water.

Now imagine this family lived in a small subdivision with 24 homes and each home on average was also using 144 gallons of water every day to flush their toilets. If every home upgraded to new low flush toilets, the entire community could have conserved and saved 892,108.8 gallons of water every year!

Other Eco-Friendly Toilet Options

There are also low-flow dual flush toilets that use even less water. These toilets have two different flushes opens—one for liquids and the other for solid waste. The liquid waste flush only uses 0.8 gallons of water, while the solid waste flush uses 1.6 gallons of water.

TIP: You can upgrade an existing toilet to a dual flush toilet by having your plumber install a dual-flush control.

If you want to save even more water, look for toilets with the WaterSense label. These toilets meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) criteria for low-flush/low-flow toilets and use twenty percent less water than standard 1.6-gallon flush toilets.

You can also combine WaterSense toilets with dual flush controls. This would result in using 1.28 gallons of water for solid waste flushes and only 0.64 gallons of water for liquid waste flushes.

Fun Fact: Based on the EPA’s calculations, if all homes in the United States replaced their inefficient toilets with WaterSense models, it would result in conserving and saving 520 billion gallons of water each year, which would fill approximately 10.4 billion garden-sized bathtubs!

If you want to save even more water, you can convert the lid on the back of the toilet into a small sink. When you flush the toilet, fresh, clean water flows out the faucet so you can wash your hands. Then it drains into the tank on the back of the toilet. There are conversion kits you can use on existing toilets to add this feature.

For more information about eco-friendly, water-saving toilets for your home, please feel free to contact MET Plumbing & Air Conditioning at 281-603-9949 today!