Comment by gonzalohm
3 days ago
One thing that shocks me as an immigrant from Europe to the US is toilets. I have not seen a single one that has the two buttons, one for pee and one for the other stuff.
Every time I use the toilet it uses 1.6 gallons. 6 liters...
I think in my home country more than 90% of home toilets are the "low water usage one" (with 3 and 6 liters buttons)
And that's only the start, I noticed that people just don't care about water usage over here. People take water from wells with little oversight. In my home country you need a vast amount of bureaucracy to be allowed to take water from aquifers
The toilet flushing thing is performative. Even if toilet water usage were enough to be worth caring about, dual flush toilets use more water over the lifetime of the toilet, because the more complex designs have a higher failure rate: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/29/dual-flu...
Also, in about half of the country, aquifers replenish as fast as they are used, so there's no point in regulating their use. The largest concern is usually whether or not the well is contaminated.
Say every single one of the 330 million people in America flushes a toilet five times a day, every day of the year.
That’s still less than a cubic mile of water. Lake Mead, by comparison, has a volume of 7 cubic miles. Every American could go back to using outhouses and the water savings wouldn’t even be noticeable.
People are not very good at visualizing this stuff. The volumes involved are hard to grasp.
Or think of it this way: if you personally saved all that water by using an outhouse, it would amount to less than 300 gallons a month. My water bill doesn’t even show usage at a resolution high enough to see those savings. I’m billed per 1,000 gallons.
If the water company doesn’t care enough to track it and charge me for it, it’s noise.
For what it's worth there are other considerations like wastewater processing capacity, especially when it rains
See e.g. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/whats-new/progr...
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/shared-sewer-systems-househ...
https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/the-dirty-t...
EU put forwards some Eco labeling thing in 2013 to encourage toilet manufacturers to get eco certified and people buy the stuff (though it was already common long before 2013)
Regulation can be for the greater good, and in this case it's not even mandatory.
I feel like there's a cultural difference where wastefulness is frowned upon at home but encouraged in the US. Big cars, big trucks(cars), big trucks(lorries), big (green)lawns, big roads, big houses, big servings, drive everywhere, fly everywhere, no trains, no public transport.
Everything is big except infrastructure unrelated to cars. Except for some cool dams built before something shifted.
And as others mentioned, the "water rights" which can be traded(bought up) by some evil megacorp instead of benefiting local farmers and population becaue ownership trumps everything.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32...
Interesting. I feel like the majority of toilets (in my US city) have both buttons and it's been that way for almost a decade.
The only time they don't is when it's a toilet that's over 10 years old.
I could be wrong, especially since I mostly just use my own toilet (has two buttons, is 6 years old) or a urinal.
Maybe it's because in the northeast rains so much that people here think water is unlimited
Could be, but I live in Seattle. It's not exactly dry here.
The two button toilets are around, but I agree that they aren't the standard.
Also, wells are regulated in the US, with the exception of low-producing home wells. Even then, they require permitting (the degree of difficulty depends largely upon the state in question). Larger-producing wells have all kinds of reporting and usage requirements associated with them, and water rights can be the most valuable part of a plot of land.
Water and the control of it is the story of the modern American West. Even today, there are a couple of folks up in a coastal community in my county who are fighting to be able to build single family homes on property they bought decades ago. The issue is, you guessed it, water.