Who says dishwater's dull?

In the US and Canada, up to one-third of the water used in a typical household gets used to flush toilets. In Florida, the actual percentage is less than that (23.3% according to the City of Tampa) but our gallon per person per day use is a staggering 243 gallons a day. And 75 of those increasingly scarce gallons get wasted on lawns. Appalling! Appalling and incredibly wasteful and it's the wastefulness that bothers me more than anything.

The United States is on a collision course with a big water problem. Florida's number will come up sooner than the rest of the country's. As much as I would LOVE to blame Florida's plight on lawns, they are only part of the problem. Another big, wasteful part is the water gets thrown down the toilet, 1.6 gallons at a time.

Yes, this is wrecking the environment; but for most people, that wreckage is something that they have to go out of their way to see. I mean, who bothers to drive to the Everglades, get out of the car and look? Freaks like me for starters and it ain't pretty. But aside from that, where it has a major effect on people in the short term is in the amount of money they spend on municipal water and sewer rates. As Florida plows into an era of increasingly scarce water, those rates are going to skyrocket. So what can you do now to save money immediately and save a whole lot of money down the road?

An answer is a BRAC Greywater System from AquaPro Solutions. AquaPro Solutions is a North Carolina-based water conservation and management company. The BRAC Greywater System sets up a parallel plumbing system in your home that will allow you to make your own reclaimed water. Waste water from your bathroom sinks, clothes washer and shower gets filtered, saved and re-routed for use to flush your toilets and run your irrigation system. Check out the schematic below. Depending on how much water your household uses, you could cut up to half of your water use with a system like this. A-maz-ing.

It's curtains for solar power

No, I mean that literally. Who says that solar power requires bulky, roof-mounted glass panels? Certainly not Sheila Kennedy, principal architect of Kennedy & Violich Architecture in Boston. Kennedy has developed what she's calling solar textiles; thin, membrane-like materials that can be draped or can cover walls or roofs. In a prototype she just finished displaying in Germany called "Soft House" (it's what's pictured here), Kennedy made patio draperies for a pre-fab structure that could generate 16,000 watt-hours of electricity.

Solar textiles are new and they utilize organic photovoltaics (OPVs), the next generation in solar power. At this stage of the game though, OPVs are less efficient than the old-school silicon-based photovoltaics. OPVs are the new name of the game though, and look for their efficiencies to improve as their prices come down over time. Brace yourself kids, the future is now.

Many thanks to my pals at Treehugger.com for the heads up on this terrific story.

Shoal, shoal, shoal

What a great word, shoal. I love it when a lighting designer turns to the natural world for inspiration and that's precisely what Dominic Bromley did when he came up with Shoal. For anyone who's never turned on the Discovery Channel, a shoal is a school of fish in a tightly circling configuration.

Dominic Bromley is an industrial designer turned lighting designer for Scabetti in the UK. Scabetti specializes in gorgeous, custom household objects and Bromley's responsible for their lighting.

The shoal is made from 284 individually sculpted bone china fish and they circle a tube light. bone china is translucent, so each of the fish in the light fixture glows and casts a shadow. The effect in a room must be stunning. It almost seems unfair to call this a light fixture. What it is more than anything is a sculpture.

Poppin' my cork

Check out the new face of cork floors. Zoom in on that image and ooooh and ahhhh. That's the newest incarnation of a cork floor and it's a cork mosaic floor.

Here's how it works. Corks cut for use as wine stoppers are thinly sliced and glued to a square foot sheet of paper. Then they're installed with mastic and grouted in the same way one would install any other mosaic tile.

Cork is resilient, water-resistant, sound deadening, flexible and renewable --all pluses in my book. Where this stuff really starts to shine though is that it can be stained to any color you'd like (that makes sense because after all, it's made from the same cellulose that any wood product is). BUT, it can also be sealed and used in a wet area like a shower floor or a spa.

This is too cool. I've never met a mosaic I didn't like and this stuff's great from every angle.

These tiles are made by the Canadian firm, the Jelinek Cork Group. Jelinek has an extensive list of cork product offerings and I agree with them that cork doesn't get the attention in the US that it deserves.

In addition to their well-done website, Jelinek operates and online store and outlet called The Corkhouse. At the Corkhouse you can browse through their flooring offerings, but where else but The Cork House are you going to find a cork purse or a cork hat?

Pre-fab fabulous

Finally! I can say something positive about Lowe's.

On the heels of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina three years ago, Lowe's got involved in the pre-fab housing industry to meet the pressing housing needs of the Northern Gulf Coast. They seem to have tapped into a wellspring of unmet need because Lowe's is now selling a line of "kit houses" a la Sears at the turn of the last century. This line of kit houses from Lowe's features the designs of such New Urbanist visionaries as Marianne Cusato, Andres Duany, Eric Moser, W.A Lawrence and Geoffrey Mouen. And much in the same way that Sears did it a hundred years ago, these houses are available for purchase as a set of plans or as a set of plans plus every screw and 2x4 needed to build one of these admittedly cool houses. At an average of $55 a square foot, these beauties are proving that sustainable housing can be affordable housing and still be cool housing.