Your Old Commode Could Soon Be on the Road

From The Coloradoan, Ft. Collins, CO.

Your old commode could soon be on the road.

It won't develop wheels and take off to see the countryside, but porcelain toilets are now getting a new life as part of our local streets.

Perhaps you've been interested in replacing your older toilets but worried that throwing functional toilets into the landfill is wasteful or that a new toilet won't work the same. Now there's new use for those old gallon-guzzling toilets.

A cooperative venture among Fort Collins Utilities, the Natural Resources and Streets departments, and the local nonprofit ReSource, is offering a free recycling program for porcelain toilets. The toilets are taken from ReSource to the Streets department crushing operations site. The crushed porcelain is combined into an aggregate and used as road base.

Retiring your older high-water-using toilet helps conserve water and save money. Pre-1994 toilets use 3.5 to 7 gallons per flush (gpf). If your home was built before 1994 and the bathrooms haven't been updated, your household can easily save thousands of gallons of water a year by installing a low-flow toilet.

Since 1994, toilets manufactured in the U.S. have been 1.6 gpf. You might be wary of the performance of a toilet that uses so little water; perhaps you've even heard negative stories of the first generation of low-flow toilets.

But technology has come a long way since the first low-flow toilets were introduced. Low-flow no longer means low performance. Now, even more savings can be gained with high-efficiency models that use 1.28 gpf or less.

WaterSense, a new Environmental Protection Agency program, labels toilets that are certified by an independent laboratory to meet rigorous criteria for performance and efficiency. Design advances enable WaterSense-labeled toilets to save water with no trade-off in flushing power and performance. In fact, many perform better than standard toilets in consumer testing.
Similar to the EPA label for Energy Star appliances, WaterSense is meant to promote and enhance the market for water-efficient products and services.

As a WaterSense partner, the city can help consumers find reliable products that conserve water. Check out the list of WaterSense labeled high efficiency toilets at www.epa.gov/watersense