The toilet may be a source of waste you rarely think about. You can significantly reduce that waste starting today!

Green Life Project is a weekly series of posts highlighting one change for readers to make in their life in order to gradually green their lives.  If you’re just joining us, feel free to jump right in here on week six — you can catch up later!

||Week Six||

This week’s Green Life Project action item is to displace water in your toilet’s tank.

We had so much fun greening our TP use last week that we figured another week spent greening our bathrooms made a lot of sense!  If you already have a high efficiency toilet, you can take this week off.  Otherwise, there is a simple and effective way to reduce water waste right now!

If you’re like most Americans,  you probably have an old clunker of a toilet flushing with several gallons of water every flush!  You might be using several times the amount of needed freshwater, and we can help you to trim a little of that waste.

Putting a Bandage on this Problem

With water potentially becoming the new oil, we all need to do all of those, “little things,” to reduce our own water use.   According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “inefficient toilets are responsible for most of the water wasted in American homes.”

So we’re starting with this issue to try to put a, “bandage,” on the problem, since this is not a permanent fix. Ideally, we would all have high-efficiency toilets, but not all of us are going to be updating our toilets anytime soon, especially not if you rent or are feeling the effects of the economic downturn.  But, you can use less water with every flush starting today with materials you already have!

Here’s How:

Find a rock or brick that is big enough to displace a liter or so of water in your toilet, but not too big.  You want to be able to place it in the corner of the tank.

Can’t find one that will work?  Consider one of the now-banished-from-your-life water bottles!   If you’ve been dutifully following along on the Green Life Project, you are using your metal water bottle for drinking, but maybe your recycling bin has a liter or two-liter bottle that might work.  This could be a chance to take advantage of your hopefully now-retired reusable plastic water bottle, too!

Okay, so now what do I do?

If it’s a brick or rock, make sure it is relatively free of dirt and debris and sink it into the corner of the toilet.  Be careful not to drop the item so that you don’t chip or crack the porcelain.

If you’re using a bottle, first remove the label so that it can’t come loose in the tank and get into your plumbing.  Next, put some loose pebbles into the bottle and top it off with water.   This will help ensure it is heavy enough to sit still and not move into the way of the plumbing.  Seal the bottle tightly, and sink it into the tank.

Make sure that the item is not blocking any of the functionality of the toilet’s inner parts and that it is sitting securely in the corner.

Now, every time you flush, the amount of water that the object has displaced is not flowing down the drain.  You can experiment and see if a second rock or a second liter bottle might fit and not affect your toilet’s performance.  This would of course increase the savings!

How much are the savings?

Now, depending upon your toilet, you may be already wasting a great deal of water with your toilet.  I won’t try to calculate that for you because of the great variance in toilet tank sizes.  Waste may be difficult to calculate, but we can think about potential savings a little more easily.

Think about it this way: unless you have a high-efficiency toilet, the job could likely be done for a third or quarter of the water you are currently using per flush.

On the EPA’s fact sheet regarding WaterSense-labeled toilets, they have this to say about the amount of water that you can save:

Over the course of your lifetime, you will likely flush the toilet nearly 140,000 times. If you replace older, existing toilets with WaterSense labeled models, you can save 4,000 gallons per year with this simpler, greener choice.

Whoa!  I’m not asking you to replace your toilet this week.  We’ll discuss WaterSense Labeled toilets in a later post.  If you are doing any remodeling, I would recommend you take a look at a high-efficiency toilet as part of the deal!  In the meantime, let’s put a small fix on this problem until a permanent toilet solution is realistic for your home.

Wrap-up

This week, complete this simple, five- or twenty-minute task.  You could save a lot of much needed freshwater.  This is only a, “bandage,” put on the situation at hand: millions of outdated, inefficient toilets.

But look at it this way: if one million of us each displaced a single liter of water in our toilet tanks in this manner, and we each were to use the toilet four times in a day, that would be four million liters of freshwater saved everyday.

That’s almost 1.5 billion liters (about 386 million gallons) saved every year –  without any new plumbing, new toilet fixtures, or any expensive gadgets!

Simple projects like could help anyone to get over their eco-doubt!

What do you think?  How’s your green life project shaping up?

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