Eco-friendly toilets - not designed for the number 2s ...

Eco-friendly toilets gone wrong ...

Excerpt from Sydney Morning Herald:

Flushed with the best intentions

21 June 2007

With mounting horror, customers at the Candana Designs fancy bathroom shop in Woollahra read the large sign erected in the toilet section: "To comply with Australian Standards all toilets are required to flush with a maximum of six litres of water. In order to comply with this regulation, manufacturers have reduced the size of the 'throat' inside the toilet pan. In most cases this necessitates using a toilet brush after flushing and flushing a second time."

In other words, to flush a toilet properly, you'll need to flush twice and use 12 litres of water - which is more than the amount used by the old nine-litre toilets with wider "throats", which are better at ingesting potential blockages.

Thousands of years of sanitation and a drought have brought us to this point: toilets that don't do what toilets are supposed to do. That famous 19th-century British pioneer of sanitary plumbing, Thomas Crapper, would be rolling in his grave.

Thanks to new federal regulations which came into force on January 1, it is now illegal to install a toilet that does not have a six-star water efficiency rating.

According to Marc Reed, managing director of Candana Designs, the feeble flush of the new eco-friendly toilet has made a lot of customers hopping mad.

"We've had numerous complaints from people who … are paying $2000 for a toilet … and say it's not flushing. The old toilets used to flush everything away. But with the six-litre, it only takes 80 per cent of the waste away and you have to flush it again - which means you're using more water than you used to."

As a result, Reed says, there is now a growing market for second-hand toilets.

While six-litre/three-litre flush toilets have been the norm for new houses for years, to the average consumer, new water-efficient toilets mean a lot more action with the toilet brush and the constant threat of blockages.

It's not a matter often referred to in polite company, but the toilet is nonetheless something Australians use, on average, five times a day, accounting for one quarter of household water use.

As those who have experienced a new eco toilet know, having to flush several times is not the worst of it. There is also the problem of what is known in the trade as "marking", as the water sits lower down the bowl, leaving exposed vast expanses of vitreous china.

A narrower throat also means more blockages.

If you happen to have an over-zealous user of toilet paper in your family, colloquially known as the "scruncher", this is inclined to happen regularly.


Often children will continually flush the toilet in an attempt to hide the evidence of their profligacy. The inevitable result is water that rises and rises and rises as you stare transfixed, feet stuck to the floor as it reaches the rim, and then subsides, or doesn't, in which case your feet are stuck to the floor in more ways than one. You can find yourself channelling Peter Sellers's character Hrundi V. Bakshi from The Party.

The water-conscious are fond of saying "if it's yellow, let it mellow", but if it's brown it's supposed to flush down, not erupt all over your bathroom floor.

Australia's foremost toilet expert is Dr Steve Cummings, head of research and development at Australian manufacturer Caroma, inventor of the dual flush toilet. In an interview this week that would make Kenny proud, he explained that Caroma has spent "hundreds of thousands of hours" designing its eco-friendly toilets, test-driving new designs at its Wetherill Park laboratory, where artificial materials are used to monitor the flush.

Unlike many imported brands, Caroma has not sacrificed throat size to increase suction. "We've put a lot of effort into fine-tuning the design of the pan and the cistern," he says. "If you design a toilet properly … if the toilet seat, the water surface area and the user are ergonomically aligned … the target area [should be hit]."

He does point out that much "depends on the diet" of the user, which may account for some of the "enormous problems" with blockages that occur in America.

Caroma's sales in the US have doubled in the past year, as water consciousness takes hold, and the old super-sized 20-litre American models are outlawed.

Cummings says he has had just a handful of complaints about Caroma's eco-friendly toilets.

"The toilet brush has been around since the 19th century," he says, not very sympathetically. "Some people just don't want to clean the toilet."

In the US, he warns, "they have plungers".

And there's much more to come. Caroma's Smartflush uses just 4.5 litres/three litres. Its new waterless urinal, the H2Zero Cube, last month won the Australian Design Awards' inaugural sustainability prize. Its secret is a one-way airtight valve that would save 2 million litres of water a year in the average office building.

Worried about the smell without water? There is a built-in deodoriser, activated by the heat of the urine. Hmmm.

As the rain pours down on Sydney this week, we are left with these absurd legacies of the drought, from small-throated toilets to dribbling showers to Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull's latest discussion paper about putting recycled sewage into our drinking water.

But no new dam for Sydney has emerged for discussion, as the population continues to grow.

Meanwhile, on the South Coast, at Braidwood and Hillview and Nerriga, near where the Welcome Reef Dam would have been built on the Shoalhaven River, rainfall recorded in the past 20 days was 150 millimetres, 181 millimetres and 274 millimetres respectively.

That would have been a nice start for a dam, not to mention saving wear and tear on the toilet brushes of the future.

See - Eco-friendly toilets - Flushed with the best intentions.