Talking about water
“Water, water, every where / Nor any drop to drink” (with apologies to Coleridge)
I got a bit of an education the other day whilst carrying out a survey for a local council who are trying to reduce their costs and their carbon footprint.
We got talking about water.
Now, normally when we get on to this track, we are talking about fairly rudimentary things like water & motor controls for washrooms and using sustainably sourced local water for client meeting rooms and the like.
But this is the public sector and it appears that there is a ruling that (and please bear with me if this gets a bit gritty!) public sector buildings must have self flushing systems for male washrooms of 7 litres of water every 20 minutes. This particular building has 20 washrooms, so that’s 10,080 litres per day (since the system cannot be interfered with and so flushes 24 hours a day) or 3.7 million litres per year.
At an average cost of 0.19p per litre (source: uSwitch.com), that’s £7,000 per year just so that Govt. Health & Safety wallahs can justify their jobs by not allowing a urinal to dry out!
And I write this on the day that Lord Mandy (wearing a delicious shade of green custard) and Gordon Brown attend a high profile Low Carbon Summit in London to look at ways in which the UK can develop jobs and business in environmental industries.
Sounds to me like the only output from that will be let’s hire more HSE employees to monitor the raft of ridiculous and, frankly, resource decimating legislation, rules and guidelines that keep the civil servants in jobs-for-life and good pensions.
We never really talk about water when we look at the reduction in business critical resource; the headliners are usually gas, oil and coal because they are more obvious and can be related to the high priest of environmentalists - carbon. Yet water is just another resource that is disappearing.
The latest James Bond movie may just have been looking at a global terror that fitted an action movie, but it raised a serious point; fresh water reserves are diminishing and if you think you can continue business-as-usual with a new fleet of desalination plants, then let’s hope your profit margins and cash reserves are looking healthy because .19p per litre is NOT what you’ll be paying after we have allowed the public sector, at the insistence of central govt., to flush every last drop of fresh water down the toilet… literally!
What appears to be missing, as ever, is the government’s ability to create an infrastructure where the left hand knows what the right hand is doing and is indicative of a leadership that believes that the way to keep going is to pander to the imagined demands of its electorate and corporate sponsors & supporters (as witnessed by Harriet Harman’s dangerously naïve claim that it will overturn Fred Goodwin’s pension deal – apparently an indication that this government is willing to break the law to appease the populace or in the words that will haunt her to her political grave, this is not acceptable “in the court of public opinion”)
There is good news for the private sector, however. We don’t have to obey this silly rule; so if your Facilities chap tells you that your system is the same as that which operates in the public sector, tell him to look at the alternatives; the ROI case for installing manual controls is self evident and water volume release controls are a dime a dozen.
You’ll not only be saving a packet but you’ll be safeguarding a longer term resource supply issue because, trust me, if it isn’t there to flush down the toilet, it won’t be there to drink!
