toilets and green design

yay for green building and design!

Old Toilets Never Die
Filed under: Recycling, Water conservation, Building and renovation, Green building
08:46 am - April 11, 2007



They just take up landfill space. So do old tubs and sinks. But keeping an old toilet in your house, simply to conserve landfill space, could prove to be a bane on the world's water supply, since old models can use up to 8 gallons per flush whereas some of the newest use as little as 1.3.


What to do, then, with those mile-high piles of inefficient toilets? Well, use them to cover your kitchen counter, of course. EnviroGlas, pioneers in the world of recycled glass tiles and countertops, has recently introduced EnviroMODE, a porcelain terrazzo comprised of ground up bathroom fixtures.


Terrazzo surfaces are made up of an aggregate (about 80 percent) suspended in some sort of resin (20 percent). With traditional terrazzo, the aggregate is usually marble, which comes from quarries that blight scenic landscapes across the U.S. EnviroMODE, on the other hand, proves to be an aesthetic boon, ridding the nation's landfills of valuable porcelain and preventing trash dumps from becoming sinks for our sinks.


Fortunately, the world is...ahem...flush with cast-off fixtures, says Patty Bates-Ballard, director of communications and training at EnviroGlas. They've been sourcing their porcelain from municipal recycling programs and from pre-consumer products that don't meet manufacturer's standards. But still, she says, "We get calls at least once a week from people saying, 'I've got a bunch of toilets, and I want get rid of them."


EnviroMODE is suitable for countertops and floors, ranging from $50 to $90 per square foot for countertop applications and $20 to $30 per square foot for floor and wall tiles. While the epoxy resin is petroleum-based, it meets LEED standards for no-VOC emissions and actually contains a small amount of rapidly-renewable coconut oil. For more info, see www.enviromode.com or www.enviroglasproducts.com. And yes, the porcelain is thoroughly cleaned.


Photos courtesy of EnviroGlas and Jason Woelfel.


© The Green Guide, 2006