Wednesday, August 07, 2013

Warming Wednesdays: European water conservation

Everywhere we visited in Spain, hotels emphasized that water is a scarce resource. This was particularly evident in an elegant design for flushing toilets that we would do well to adopt in the States.

Big deposit? Use the big button. Just liquid? There's a small button.


There were plenty of less obtrusive variants on the theme as well ...

Despite all the emphasis on water saving, some Euro plumbing fixtures were more than I quite knew what to do with.

I didn't even try to figure out how to utilize this one.

Nor could I quite decode this coaster in a Zurich hotel bathroom:
***
Kidding aside, it was completely obvious that stressed water supplies were part of everyone's conscious environment during our Spanish travels. When I get to posting pictures from the Alpujarras area, there'll be some of the surviving Moorish irrigation system that makes this a viable truck garden for the Mediterranean coastal towns. We could do with more of this water consciousness.

Despite every other legitimate concern, we cannot ignore that our economic and social system is rapidly making the planet less habitable. So I will regularly be posting "Warming Wednesdays" -- reminders of an inconvenient truth.

4 comments:

janinsanfran said...

Moving a comment over from Facebook:
Susan wrote: "First dual flush I saw was at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Chicago."

Good to learn!

janinsanfran said...

And another FB comment:
Kalpana Shankar: Dual flush toilets in public places have been quite common in Europe - even where water shortages aren't as big an issue (first encountered one in 2007 in Amsterdam).

Classof65 said...

Unfortunately there are no instruction manuals for tourists and each loo I "visited" had a different configuration! The button for the loo in my hotel room in Dusseldorf was on the wall opposite the loo (about six feet away from the facility).

Hattie said...

Spanish plumbing and Swiss English.what a combination.