High-pressure shower head is my right?
February 19, 2008
Posted by CindyW in : Opinions & Thoughts , trackback
Read this interesting story on my local paper this weekend: During the winter break, the housing authority at Stanford University sneaked into the dorm bathrooms and swapped in low-flow shower heads. The nozzle swap was intended to save 12 million gallons of water annually. The result? After a letter-writing campaign, a newspaper editorial and a number of students’ meetings with Stanford officials, the housing authority backed down and promised to retrofit the dorms with higher-pressured nozzles.
(courtesy of www.thedailygreen.com)
The forcing-green-upon-thee approach was clearly misguided. And if the housing authority did not actually test out the shower heads before their sneak attack, it should be chastised for wasting resources and students’ time. Still, though I have no knowledge how unbearable these particular low-flower shower headers were, I suspect there was quite a bit of not-in-my-backyard syndrome here – conserving natural resources was the right thing to do as long as it doesn’t impact me.
Perhaps it is a reflection of all of us, so accustomed to our must-have comforts. We must shower 15 minutes once or twice a day. Who among us don’t know people that need to the shower to “wake up”? And sadly we can’t imagine any other way. But with the impending water crisis, we won’t be imaging other ways for very long. “Our results (regarding water supply) are not good news for those living in the western United States,” wrote the team led by Tim Barnett, a climate expert at Scripps Institution, part of the University of California at San Diego. The water supply crisis is projected to arrive in the next twenty years. Barnett continued to say that, “there’s not much we can do to change that. We’re going to have to adapt our infrastructure and some of our societal needs to fit the way the world is changing.”
The following map is from the U.S. Department of Interior’s Water 2025 report. It shows which western cities are at risk for water crises and conflicts.
Sooner or later, we will all either have low-flow shower heads or stop taking luxurious 15 minute shower.
As a leading education institute with innovative thinking, perhaps Stanford housing can device new interesting ways of getting students involved in saving resources. Cap and trade resources (water, electricity, parking space, etc.) anyone? It’s actually not so far-fetched. The school I went to had a bidding system for classes, pretty fair based on years of practice. Each student was allocated 10,000 points at the beginning of registration. We could allocate the points and bid for the classes that we were most interested in. Perhaps Stanford can cap total resource usage points and students can bid for the resources most important to them, be it water, electricity, or parking space.
CindyW
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Comments»
It’s kind of sad that university students would object to low-flow showerheads. You would think that younger people would be more environmentally conscious and you would have thought that whatever the campus “environmental” clubs would have spoken up. It’s even worse that this is happening in California where there are serious drought considerations.
I have a low flow showerhead on my shower that I didn’t actually even put on. My landlord has them installed in all the apts because the building pays for our water. And it’s so not a big deal. Now maybe the low-flow showerheads at Stanford really really sucked, but in my experience, it’s really not that bad at all. I don’t even notice it.
I get cynical when I hear stories like this. My condo had low flow shower head when I bought the place. It may not give me the “premium-quality” showers, it has been working just fine. Sure, the housing management did not use the proper approach when they did the switch. But please, I will say it bluntly: they are totally spoiled.
I disagree that the kids are necessarily spoiled. I think the school should have handled the situation differently. Perhaps they could have done some education beforehand to explain to the students why changing the showerheads would be necessary. Perhaps they could have set goals for each dorm to voluntarily lower their water usage (by kids taking shorter showers or showering less often) by a certain date, after which the showerheads would be changed if the goal wasn’t met.
Personally, I’d rather take a short, powerful shower every other day than a long drippy one. I’m one who loves the feeling of water pounding on me in the morning, if only for a few short minutes. I’ve lived in places where the shower heads just kind of “spat” on me, and each shower was pretty depressing. And I don’t think I’m spoiled.
It is sad that the younger generation is not more willing to make changes for the environment. Of course, Beth has a good point - perhaps it was not sold to them as a way to save water. Still, I’m a bit cynical about college students these days. I just finished Affluenza which details several polls of college students. In all of these polls, the vast majority of those polled state they are most interested in making money. A very small percentage cited effecting social change.