For our project, Garrett and I spent some time searching for sustainable water projects from which we could directly connect to UNE’s own sustainable water use, finally settling on the idea to implement dual flush toilets in as many buildings on campus as possible. Now although this sounds like a large scale program UNE already has this type of project, but it is limited to specific buildings, such as the commons and the forum, as well as a few extras within other buildings. To compare, we decided to look at a very similar project that was conducted by Harvard on their own campus.

On their campus they started by replacing about 675 toilets, and the program due to plenty of success began to spread to the rest of campus. However here at UNE this is much harder to implement. Many buildings are old and already in need of renovation, while others are newer and simply weren’t built with sustainability in mind. So instead Garrett and I decided that this program could be implemented as a part of our building renovation requirements, forcing the program into place, but without spending a massive amount of money all at once. We believe that this could easily be implemented, and all studies show that this system does truly lower water use significantly.