The ‘’Fluidity’’ is designed to serve a double function. The concept’s success lies in its simplicity. Basically, it is a dish drying rack that lets you grow your fresh herbs and any small plant you want.
The water that trickles from the washed dishes irrigates the plants. The base, thanks to its fluid form, directs the waste water into the sections where are plant containers placed. Each container is perforated at the bottom for water passage
Showers are usually set pretty firmly in one place, they need a water source, drainage, electricity — basically, they’re the first thing you forgo when you leave the safety of a modern building. Tokyo-based startup Hotaru has introduced a portable water-recycling shower that can be set up almost anywhere.
The shower holds about 19 litres of water, which is then purified and reused for the next person who hops in. Hotaru claims that a family of three could each take a five-minute shower each day for up to two weeks. That’s over 40 showers on less than 20 litres of water. While the possibilities for where the shower can go are pretty endless, it does need to be hooked up to a power source — although, according to Hotaru, a car will do the trick.
This shower curtain will stop you from ever overstaying your welcome again: The tap has a sensor and after 4 minutes of running water, the sensor triggers the inflation of the spikes via an air inflator.
Educating the public is an important starting point, but it has even more impact when accompanied by specific initiatives that encourage people to save water. In addition to raising awareness of the severe decline in the city’s water storage levels, Melbourne city leaders wanted to encourage citizens to consume less water at home. One way to achieve that goal was for city inhabitants to spend less time in the shower. Interviews revealed that many people were reluctant to give up long showers, so the city offered them free, water-efficient showerheads. In response to complaints that the showerheads were ugly, the city developed a flow regulator for existing shower heads, enabling even more people to save water. Within four years, Melburnians had replaced more than 460,000 showerheads and had submitted 100,000 requests to the city for flow regulators. Overall, Melbourne ultimately reduced its water demand per capita by almost 50%.
Businesses, too, can empower individuals to change their habits. In the United Arab Emirates, which ranks second in the world among water-scarce countries, government officials launched a national campaign to conserve energy and water. A Heroes Business Toolkit taught companies to monitor and reduce their water consumption by installing water-saving fixtures, using water-efficiency devices, and repairing leaks, for example. The campaign worked. Hundreds of companies downloaded the toolkit, and several joined the Corporate Heroes Network, which challenged them to achieve specific reduction targets within one year. Companies that completed the challenge cut their water usage by more than a third.
Traditional water meters are usually read once a month. Internationally, many homes either do not have water meters at all, or rely on manual meter readings. But in South Africa, it’s obviously more cause for concern, given the water constraints and recent drought.
Smart metering has the potential to address these challenges. Smart metering leverages recent advances in wireless and electronic technology to remotely record and report metering. Since water is such a basic commodity, it’s provided at such a low cost, occasionally even for free that it does not usually make financial sense to invest in smart water metering technologies for billing purposes. The objective, however, is not to perform billing, but to create awareness and help people conserve water. This can be done through understanding how consumption patterns relate to water volumes used.
In one case study with a smart meter developed at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, a local coffee shop was able to reduce its consumption by 68% in one week by only making the consumption information available online to the owner. However, the biggest impact was observed at schools. Through initial awareness and a swift response, an average of 16 kiloliters of water is already being saved at three local schools. The monthly savings at one primary school is the equivalent of two junior teachers’ salaries.
In addition to the daily savings, the smart meters showed excessive water flowing when pipes bursts or irrigation systems were activated. By acting on this information within minutes, one school was able to prevent losses of around 1 million litres of water through a burst pipe in the middle of the school holidays.