Megan Hall: Welcome to Possibly, where we take on huge problems like the future of our planet and break them down into small questions with unexpected answers. I’m Megan Hall.
Megan Hall: A few months ago, our team was talking on Zoom about our next episodes….
Megan Hall: When our founder, Stephen Porder, asked to pitch us a story idea.
Megan Hall: For this episode, we’re going to let you listen in on our conversation. Here’s Stephen-
Stephen Porder: So I’m in my shower in my dorm room here in Barceloneta France, which is in the Alps. this is a former military base that has been turned into a scientific conference center.
Megan Hall: Stephen was there to teach a course.
Stephen Porder: And in the shower, you have a regular shower with like, a dial for your hot and cold and everything. But there’s one key difference which is that in order to turn the shower on, you push, the hot-cold knob in it towards the wall, and it gives you about 10 seconds of water.
Megan Hall: He says, if you wanted to have a nonstop shower, you could just keep pushing the button,
Stephen Porder: it just requires you to deliberately take a continuous shower.
Megan Hall: Honestly, to me- this sounds like a good way to ruin a nice shower, but Stephen says he doesn’t mind. He just pushes the handle a few times to get wet, soaps up, and pushes the handle a few more times to rinse off.
Stephen Porder: my shower time has decreased by like 75% easily. the amount of time that the water is running, I’m under a minute in terms of water flow. And all it is is a different shower handle.
Megan Hall: Why does this matter? Well, the design of this handle saves water, but it also saves energy.
Megan Hall: In most houses, heating hot water is second only to heating the air when it comes to what uses the most energy in your home. Shorter showers mean you use less energy to heat the water for those showers.
Stephen Porder: we do a lot like in the US, we regulate by having, you know, low flow, showerheads, and so forth and so on. But this struck me as the most effective, like, behavior change thing that I think I’ve ever seen.
Megan Hall: We thought this could be a great example of an idea the US could borrow from France. But then Fatima realized- we have these showers here.
Fatima: they have these showers by the beach. Right?
Stephen: It’s that. It’s a beach shower.
Megan Hall: my only question is- who would voluntarily be like, yeah, I’m gonna pay to buy this device that makes it a pain in the ass to take a shower.
Stephen Porder: Right. So I happen to know the Assistant provost for sustainability at Brown.
Megan Hall: It’s him…
Stephen Porder: And they were thinking that this is something that colleges and universities could just put in the dorms and have signs up that say, look, this reduces our water use by, you know, X percent and our energy use by y percent.
Fatima: I would be a fan of that. Because that would reduce the amount of time people spend in the showers anyway. Oh, that’s a good point, too, in terms of like, just waiting to use the showers. And the hot water wouldn’t run out every time I tried to shower because people can’t just stand there.
Megan Hall: I still like a nice, uninterrupted shower. But Stephen says, it’s about more than just this specific idea-
Stephen Porder: it just made me it makes me think about all of the things that we take for granted, like how much water is used to flush the toilet that we just don’t know it is the way it is. Because that’s what’s there. So we use it.
Megan Hall: I guess the take-away here is, try looking at your daily routine with fresh eyes. Do you need to do things this way? Or is it just what you’re used to doing?
Megan Hall: I wish we could all take a trip to France to get that perspective, but I guess we’ll have to settle for a few stories on the radio.
Megan Hall: That’s it for today. For more information, or to ask a question about the way your choices affect our planet, go to the public’s radio dot org slash possibly. Or subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.
Possibly is a co-production of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown’s Climate Solutions Initiative, and the Public’s Radio.
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