Yesterday I was asked by the BBC News online to comment on an innovative piece of research by the FMCG giant Unilever. Unilever have recently launched their Sustainable Living initiative and as part of they have been investigating people’s most intimate habits –\u00a0 that is ‘what exactly goes on in the bathroom’??<\/p>\n
They rightly point out that self declaration on bathing habits, and even diaries, can be inaccurate for a number of reasons – the fact that people want to say the right thing and look good in the eyes of the investigator, or simply that people are pretty\u00a0bad at estimating time when an action is totally habitual and unconscious.<\/p>\n
So those cunning scientists at Unilever came up with a technological solution.\u00a0 They attached shower monitors onto the hot water pipes in 100 UK family homes, and monitored exactly what went on in the shower cubicle each morning.<\/p>\n
The results are startling and a little depressing.\u00a0 Although 4 minute showers are encouraged as an optimal time in which to get clean, but not to use too much hot water; the families in the study were routinely using double that!\u00a0 And, less surprisingly perhaps, young boys and teenage girls were the worst offenders in terms of time spent under the shower rose.<\/p>\n
There are a few things about the Unilever findings that I do not agree with though.\u00a0 They talk rightly about the fact that power showers can use as much water as a deep bath if too much time is spent under them, but they then quote some enormous figures in terms of how much money this might cost the average family of 4 to\u00a0run each year.<\/p>\n
For a ‘standard shower’\u00a0(although\u00a0exactly what that is\u00a0is not clearly defined) –\u00a0they say it could cost an average\u00a0family of 4 around \u00a3416 per year just to shower.\u00a0 Now this seems rather alarmist,\u00a0 if we take a standard ‘electric shower’ (46% of installed showers) as the example, then\u00a0the average electricity bill in the UK currently is around \u00a3550.\u00a0 So they are claiming that the shower alone could be accounting for 80% of the bill.\u00a0\u00a0But if\u00a0they are refering to a standard gas heated mixer shower (38% of installed showers), the number gets more far fetched – as the average gas bill nowadays\u00a0is\u00a0around \u00a3850 – so showering would account for half of that total.\u00a0 Given that a rule of thumb is that heating water\u00a0is responsible\u00a0about 30% of our heating bill (~\u00a3275), and that includes all washing and use of taps etc – then that number seems far too high for an ‘average’.<\/p>\n
There there is the \u00a3900+ for a power shower.\u00a0 This is realy taking an extreme example and presenting it in\u00a0a way that makes it sound like a possiblity for the average home-owner.\u00a0 Power showers were only 16% of the installed shower market in 2007, so they are by far the minority technology.\u00a0 They are seen to have a pump rate of between 10-20 litres\u00a0per minute.\u00a0\u00a0To arive at such a high cost, Unilever much be taking the scenario of a very high flow rate and each of the family having 8 minute showers each day.<\/p>\n
Also the average use of water per person per day in the UK is 150 litres.\u00a0 This is unnecessarily high and we have a target to reduce that to 130 litres over the coming years, but if we take the extreme example that Unilever is using, each family member uses almost\u00a0that on showering (17 litres x 8 minutes = \u00a0136 litres) alone.<\/p>\n
It could be that Unilever are somehow factoring in the water costs too, but if so it would be interesting to see how this has been done.\u00a0 As you can only make a saving, or spend more, on showering if you are on a water meter.\u00a0 There are currently approximately\u00a030% of\u00a0homes on meters, and the costs of water vary enormously around the country; hence\u00a0I would question the validity of adding a water cost to this ‘average’ price of showering.<\/p>\n
So, I salute Unilever for this ground-breaking study and alerting people to the issue of longer showers not necessarily being better – environmentally or cheaper to run – than a bath; but I do mark them down for being too extreme with their figures.\u00a0 We need to educate and bring people along with us on behaviour change issues; we should not try to shock people with unrealistic, atypical worst case scenarios presented as ‘average’.<\/p>\n
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Yesterday I was asked by the BBC News online to comment on an innovative piece of research by the FMCG giant Unilever. Unilever have recently launched their Sustainable Living initiative and as part of they have been investigating people’s most intimate habits –\u00a0 that is ‘what exactly goes on in the bathroom’?? They rightly point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-982","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-water"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=982"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1933,"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/982\/revisions\/1933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greengumption.co.uk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}