The Perfect Flush

From one of my favorite design bloggers, Penny Bonda at interiordesign.net, comes the latest in green flushing:

Some things are sexy, others aren’t. Toilets usually fall into the latter category. But they can be fabulous, especially when they single flush 0.8 gallons – and do the job – if you get my drift.

Niagara Conservation’s new Stealth toilet is the first and only toilet available with the ability to achieve a powerful, quiet flush using just 0.8 gallons of water. That’s pretty remarkable considering that most current single flush toilets use 1.6 gallons per flush and older style models flush 3.5 gallons. That adds up to impressive savings – 77 percent less water per flush than the older style 3.5 gallon toilet, saving up to 20,000 gallons of water per year and as much as $150 in savings annually per household on water usage, depending on the wastewater rate. Even dual flush toilets don’t do s well.

More impressive stats from Niagara: the U.S. has an estimated 241 million toilets, which use an estimated 1.3 trillion gallons of water. If every household in America switched to Niagara’s Stealth toilet, we could save more than 914 billion gallons of water and $6 billion in utility bills.  Even if just 10 percent of American households converted to Niagara’s Stealth toilet, it could save 91 billion gallons of water per year and provide more than $640 million in savings on utility bills.
The Stealth toilet has earned the WaterSense label, the symbol for high-performing, water-efficient products. A labeling program run by EPA, WaterSense makes it easy to find water efficient products, which is important because, even though it may not seem so, water on Earth is in short supply. According to WaterSense, “less than 1 percent is available for human use. The rest is either salt water found in oceans, fresh water frozen in the polar ice caps, or too inaccessible for use. While the population and the demand on freshwater resources are increasing, supply remains constant.”

The new Stealth toilet is currently available online at www.itseasybeinggreen.com for a retail price of $308, and will be coming soon to local retailers, kitchen and bath showrooms, as well as plumbing wholesalers.