No, we aren’t referring to some bizarre en-masse bowel movement, movement. A company is suggesting we drop an actual brick in the toilet to quickly and effectively save millions of water.
If every Californian dropped a brick in the toilet, according to founders of the Drop-A-Brick campaign, it’d save the state 67 million gallons of water a day. The campaign is looking to crowdfund the unique project via Indiegogo. The campaign requests people to simply drop a brick into the toilet’s flush-tank to cut down on the water that literally goes down the drain, thereby alleviating possibly the worst drought , the state of California has seen in the last 500 years.
The company behind the campaign is offering a rather simple device that promises to save water by taking up room in your toilet tank. It builds upon the old-school idea that if you displace that extra half-gallon of water with a brick, you’re not using said amount to flush your toilet. Essentially, the brick takes up the volume and reduces the amount of water that gets accumulated in the tank and later flushed.
The device is essentially a brick that isn’t made of traditional materials, like baked clay. These bricks are made of a nontoxic rubber. They cost about $15, and arrive in the mail in a completely flattened state. The company’s explains that these super-compressed bricks are filled with some sort of hydro-gel that quickly expands once you add a bit of water. Moreover, upon addition of water, the brick becomes as big as a normal sized brick and sinks to the bottom of the tank, where it will stay for a “very long time,” thus saving a lot of water on a daily basis.
Why can’t people just use a regular brick? Though a regular brick can do the job, the clay will eventually disintegrate and enter the pipes, where it may start clogging the entire indoor sewage system, cautions the campaign. Additionally, many modern toilet cisterns are often shaped oddly under the ruse of aesthetics. These eco-friendly rubber bricks can easily squeeze into such oddly shaped toilet tanks much more easily than clay bricks.
The campaign is an interesting take on the acute water shortage the state of California is facing . Often practices like a long, hot shower, keeping the tap turned on, etc. waste a lot of water. Though these can be curtailed by educating the masses, the only way till now to reduce water-wastage via flushes was to replace the cistern with a much smaller one. For such eco-conscious, the drop-a-brick campaign might be just the thing they were looking for.
[Image Credit | Indiegogo]
