Toilet Refurbishment to Save Over 500,000 Litres per Year

We have recently completed a refurbishment of the public toilets at St John’s Shopping Centre, the main focus of the refurbishment was to look at unique ways in which we could make the toilets more sustainable inline with wider projects around the centre.

Behind the scenes we have replaced a number of old fluorescent luminaries within the management offices and out on the service deck with high efficiency LED lighting coupled to occupancy sensors, time switches and photocells. We continued this lighting upgrade trend and included within out toilet refurbishment by installing high efficiency LED, dimmable, luminaires coupled to intelligent occupancy sensors and LED drivers that control the lighting levels as required throughout the toilets. This system also allows the centre management control over the lighting levels within these areas for the benefit of their visitors who may be affected by what is classed as normal lighting levels.

In an effort to maximise our reduction in water usage throughout the toilets we trialled some of the latest cutting-edge water reduction technology from around the world on the run up to works commencing. On conclusion of this we installed the latest Swiss Eco sensor taps which reduce the water flow per tap from the standard 5 litres per minute to 0.65 litres per minute into all our public toilets, including our baby changing facilities. We also installed waterless urinals in the gents' toilets to further reduce our water consumption.

Ken Bowman, Centre Manager said: “In the first 5 days of use we have seen a water reduction rate of 7,000 litres, 7 m3. Along with this water-saving as these taps are cold water only, we expect to see a carbon emission reduction of circa 1.6 metric tonnes of CO2 over the year due to no longer heating the washroom tap water.

Based on the water savings seen in the first 5 days of use, we estimate a potential saving of over half a million litres of water annually.