The sustainability guide to the bathroom

Green Prophet took you on a whirlwind tour of a green kitchen party. Now  we head to the bathroom. Some first steps in making the bathroom green and sustainably shiny, could start with natural cleaners on your tub, toilet and sink. You can buy them or make your own. We’ll talk in more detail about that later.

Give your drain a rinse once a month with baking soda and vinegar to keep your pipes unclogged; one of our readers recommends lemon juice on the faucets to pull away the stone.

The bathroom is where we see, smell and feel life. It is also one of the places where when we are scrubbing our bods, we consume an alarming amount of the world’s most precious resource, water.

An average shower uses about 30 gallons of water. That’s a lot of water going down the drain.

Delivering water to your home is an energy-depleting process. In some regions, half of all the electricity used by the city is spent pumping water to faucets. So not only are we wasting water when we are standing in the shower, we are also contributing to the burning of fossil fuels and global warming.

Reducing water use is the most important thing you can do to make your bathroom environmentally sound. Low-flush toilet tanks and water-saving showerheads are just some of the ways you can save water.

Over in the Middle East, Israeli facilities are equipped with the dual-flush toilets. The small button gets pressed for #1; the bigger one for #2. We hope you knew that already. More toilets like these are finding their ways into bathrooms in the United States in Canada along with the auto-flushing toilets which we hope you won’t choose.

Other simple actions can be taken to reduce your use of water. Simply turn the tap off when brushing the old teeth and when you are lathering in the shower.

The shorter the shower the better obviously, but thinking in the green direction doesn’t mean you need to forego taking that relaxing bath. Splishing and splashing with someone in the tub is not only a good way to share water, it is also a good way to get a back scrub!

Being creative with water in the shower

Put a plug in the drain while you are taking that shower and throw in some delicates and underwear that you don’t want to machine wash. Stomping around on your clothes in the tub is a good and efficient way to get them clean.

We’ve relied on this washing method while traveling, and during our first year in Israel without a washing machine; it works well and also gives you a little bit of exercise.

Those on a path to becoming seriously green in the bathroom can adopt a grey water system which prevents used water (except from the toilet) from going down the drain.

It can be a complicated thing to do; and even more complicated if you live in a rental unit. At our home, we’ve diverted the pipe from the washing machine to go straight into the garden. We use a plant-based bio-degradable clothes detergent (Ecover). So far the grape vine seems happy.

If you have any green bathroom tips, please send them our way.