Brazilian TV ad: Save water, piss in the shower Brazilian treehuggers have released a TV ad encouraging people to urinate in the shower so as to avoid unnecessary use of water when flushing the lavatory. The short vid shows various authoritative leaders of opinion including Mahatma Gandhi and King Kong - in cartoon form - engoldening their showertime experience in righteous …
Putting drinking water in a toilet (as we do now) is probably the greatest waste of resources in the world - Facebook, Twitter, and SUV's notwithstanding.
Contrary to the belief of many media-follower's it will be water, not oil, that becomes that sparks off the next worldwide war/conflict. There is already an unbelievably scarce amount of clean water available and as long as the problem is ignored (i.e. drinking water in toilets, cities in the desert, farms in the desert, etc...) it will only get worse and the entire world will be held hostage by Canada, not the Middle East.
The world must change its wasteful ways or prepare to learn French.
> Contrary to the belief of many media-follower's it will be water, not oil, that becomes that sparks off the next worldwide war/conflict
Ermmm... if we have plentiful oil (or nuclear power or windmills or other fuel), can't we use that to produce clean drinking water by distilling seawater?
It's all about the energy supply.
I don't get it, the world is *not* running out of water so "saving water" seems somewhat pointless.
Saving the energy used while purifying the water makes sense and reducing chemical usage is laudable. How much of either are actually used I don't know, but even if I did I'd hazard a guess that industrial use so enormously overshadows normal consumer use that this will make about as much difference as pissing into the wind.
Irrespective of the actual benefits to the world, I think that adding a grey water tank to the house to store shower/bath/washing machine waste water to use to flush the loo would be an interesting weekend geeky DIY project. Two options: use gravity, in which case I would need to swap the loo and the washing machine (visitors might not be cool about having the loo in the kitchen I guess) or pump the waste water upstairs with an old washing machine pump. Hmm, how much energy does that take?
Oh, and I once saw a fantastic washbasin built in to the top of a loo cistern. Basically you just replace the existing cistern lid with a concave one. After you flush, the cistern fills via this basin, so you can wash your hands in the water that is flowing into the cistern for the next flush. Fantastic idea, only slight problem is that it's cold water.
The point is, meeting the water needs of the two huge coastal cities (Rio and Sao Paulo, probably 25 million or more people in them) is drying out the big coastal forest in Brazil (ok, it was big, but not so big any more).
@ Doug Glass
Yes, they do shower several times a day. Goes with the climate. Even geeks shower every 2 days or so. Not too many geeks there, actually - it's a nation of talkers. So geeks (especially gringo geeks) are viewed as a rare and strange breed. Another good thing for geeks is that the nation runs on caffeine!
My Brazilian lady love has long favoured having a sneaky wee in the shower (but NOT the bath) - personally the crudely wired electric shower heads puts a dampener on the occasion.
Maybe I'm getting old, but that cartoon artist seemed to really REALLY like to show pics of guys pissing. I mean, couldn't they have just as well gotten their point across with only 2 or 3 scenes of pissing?
Oh, and what were they implying in the scene where the father and son are in the tub together? The son's stream was going down, the father's was arching up...
Guess I'm just too out-of-date to understand these newfangled pissing cartoons.
The Australian cistern/basin add-on is clever but it's nothing new. On a couple of trips to Japan ten years ago I saw such toilets everywhere, and they were neat and purpose-built with the basin in the lid of the cistern, not bolted on as an afterthought. I have wondered for years why modern Western homes don't employ such a system, especially in some of these tiny downstairs WCs where space is at a premium.
On the other hand these Japanese lavs also tended to sport enormous arms at the sides of the pan, covered in controls that made the bog look like the command chair of the Enterprise. Japanese innovation is marvellous, but sometimes they really need to learn when to stop adding stuff.
Go. Boldly.
Writing as a brazilian, born, raised and still living here, I am ashamed I had to have this laugh here in the El Reg. The state of the media and, TV in particular, is so disgracefull that I havent even owned a tv in nearly 10 year.
But, alas, I digress. I find it ironic that Brazil´s predominant flag colors are Green and Yellow, suposed to represent the rain forests and the gold in the mines . We actually call the caountry Green-and-Yellow Nation, so its only fitting, I guess. But bad tv ads notwithstanding, urine is actually sterile. It is not ridden with bacteria (if you dont have an infection, at least) and if you will recall, soldiers used it to clean wounds in a battle field because it is garanteed to be safer than any water you would find in the frag. Dont underestimate the power of your filtering system.
To answer someone who asked about the rhyme in portuguese, it would be
"Se é amarelo, deixe envelhecer. Se for marrom, dê a descarga"
Too bad the catchy tone is inevitably lost in the translation....
Alien, because it is green and yellow.
I partially agree with an early poster that water is as likely to trigger war as oil. There are already areas of Africa, Middle and Far East where dams are displacing people reliant on water flows.
Right, that's the serious sh*t out of the way.
Peeing while showering makes sense. Peeing in the sink is OK for blokes but not birds because they sit on the bloody thing, tearing it off the wall if they're fat.
I wonder if Paris takes an occasional golden shower? Just to keep her feet fungi free, of course.
Peeing in the shower is like masterbation ... It splits people into two camps, those who admit to having done it, and liars.
Thad writes: "Save water: Bath with a friend"
I'm fairly certain that when the wife & I shower together, we use more water than we would have if we showered separately. I guess I could time it and find out, if I cared enough. Besides, this is Sonoma. We save water by drinking wine[1].
Our property up in Fort Bragg has a gray water system that we use for the loos, the lawns, the roses, etc. The gray water goes into a cistern under the house until it reaches a certain level, then is pumped uphill (the pump runs every other day, or thereabouts). If the pump fails, overflow spills into the flower bed alongside the house and triggers an alarm (red light) in the house. Sludge needs to be cleaned out of the bottom of the cistern once or twice a year. Over-flow from the top cistern (very rare, also trigering an alarm in the house) goes into a dry well. Sludge needs cleaning out every three or four years. Gravity does the rest (don't need huge flow to irrigate roses, or fill loo tanks), except for the lawn sprinkler circuit, it has it's own pipe from the top cistern with a pump & pressure tank.
After settling in the two tanks, the resulting water is surprisingly clear. We also catch rain water off the various roofs for irrigating the veggies, with similar cistern, pump and alarm systems. All is powered by 8D "fire engine" batteries that are solar charged, with mains or generator backup when the sun's not shining.
Apropos of the article, I have a custom 12" X 4" tile in the shower that reads "No peeing in the shower! The proprietor has to clean the gray water system periodically!" In reality, I run a little bleach into the system before doing maintenance ...
[1] That's a joke ... Hydrate with water. Wine with supper. Beer after "dumb, heavy work".
[4 Solomon Grundy ] If we're dealing with Canadians, why learn French? Only a minority are Francophone.
Should any militant Quebecois turn up at the water-table (ahahaha) we can tease them about how Napoleon would have sold Canada to the Americans if they'd won on the Plains of Abraham. He cldn't offload his New World holdings fast enough in order to fund his wars. French-speaking Yanks? The French-French would regard them even worse than they do Canadian French, which is saying something.
Anyway, I plan on moving to Antarctica where, thanks to my gas-guzzling, pissing in the shower AND flushing the (clean) toilet anyway and running my dishwasher and washing machines when empty to keep them nice and clean, I'll have increased global warming and as a result have access to all the fresh water I'll ever need from the melting ice-cap.
Got to dash. I need to visit the shower.
Sure, the gletchers are shrinking, but we still get to piss in the water first..
:-)
Incidentally, I do actually like a grey tank. You can spool all sorts of stuff into that, wash machines, rain water (assuming you don't have a garden that needs it), and for those that need to offset a lot of guilt, waste water from airco and dishwasher.
I'm actually waiting for a domestic version of the flush free urinal. If that can somehow be combined with a need-to-flush-for-the sticky-bits crap processor that could save water too. My current experience with water saving toilets is that they do the opposite: they often need flushing twice. Or that could be my diet..
So, what? Do I piss in it before I get in, during, or after?
The "piss cures foot-rot" thing is referenced in Spike Milligan's excellent war memoir "Rommel? Gunner Who?" (or is it "Adolf Hitler, My Part in His Downfall"?) where an old sergeant says, when they complain of sore feet "Piss in yer boots lads!" so they all leave their boots full of piss every night, some forgetting to empty them before putting them on again in the morning.
You should change the Gates photo for one of Ballmer. He's like the Dick Cheney of the software world.
Because that minority, for some inexplicable reason, have more control over the export of water and water technologies than the Anglo's in Ottawa. Some smart guy in Quebec saw an opportunity a long time ago and wrangled water power out of the crown. Largely I expect so that they could eventually force the Queen and her evil minions out of the country. Je me souviens - they've been looking for revenge for a looong time.
@ Solomon Grundy : Nice try there is only one problem the mjor metropolitan areas in this country other than London (Birmingham et al.) are afair way away from the sea so the issue is not power the the enormous cost, unless we use rivers and aquaducts (Rommans - brilliant), of a massive water main network to supply said salt free water to some 8m+ people.
I Try my best to explain to people that we need to reduce energy comsumption as much as generate it from non fossil derived sources.
On the water note it is good to see the Germans are ahead again by requiring rainwater storage tanks to be fitted to new housing and we are erm still struggling with decent insulation.
This is stupid why pee in the shower where your going to wash. The first day I moved in to my flat I said that's it if anyone pee's in the shower i'm gonna **** you up and then pee on your bed. I'd rather they pee'd in the toilet like normal people. Thats why toilets we're invented. Fair enough if they don't flush (which I also disagree with because it smells and leaves a nasty yellow ring of shit in the loo) but not in the shower! Whats the world coming to? who we saving this water for exactly. Maybe in Brazil but i'll tell you what until I have to choose between drinking water and flushing water its not going to bother me at all to flush every time! tramps.
Steve Jobs because he smells like most peoples showers by the looks of things.
1. I would rather not receive a "rebound" of other people's piss up my ass when I take a dump, therefore I have to flush the toilet twice anyway, why couldn't they have flushed it when they took a piss?
2. Flushing the toilet does not wake most people up. Even if it does, they would get used to it after a short while.
3. Piss stinks if you leave it there, especially if you piss into the piss an hour later.
4. It's not that much water, how about people stop wasting tons and tons of water sprinkling their lawns.
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