If you're concerned that you and your family are sending gallons of potentially useful water (literally) down the pan, help could be at hand from Hippo the Water Saver; a simple and cheap bit of kit that reduces the amount of water wasted by your loo.
The hippo is made from a squishy plastic composite that opens up "origami style" when placed inside the cistern. It absorbs excess water, and When the toilet is flushed, the water confined within the Hippo is the volume saved. The hippo has a lifetime guarantee, and works with most toilets, saving at least 33% of the water we regularly flush away. A pack of 3 Hippos costs just £7.99 from Hippo the Watersaver
Don't be fooled into thinking that you're a saint for having showers instead of baths or for turning off the tap while you brush your teeth. There's a lot more to water saving than meets the eye, and waterfootprint is here to set you straight on the matter.
Anything that we consume, be it food, clothing, gadgets or whatever, requires water in varying amounts for its production. So the point is it's good to have an idea of how much water has been used in getting a given product to you. For example, according to the site, the total water footprint of one cup of coffee is 140 litres -- and I'll bet that's quite a bit more agua than you put in the kettle, even if you weren't using an eco-friendly model...
If that sounds alarming, help is at hand with this water footprint calculator you can use to monitor your own personal water usage based on where you live. It doesn't give much in the way of advice on how to improve your score (other than turning vegetarian -- it takes a shocking 16 thousand litres of water to produce one kilogram of beef -- but it does get you thinking about a subject that even the greenest among us often forget.
In the wake of a summer which saw many parts of Britain a bit too waterlogged for comfort, it is essential that Britain moves faster in its implementation of flood prevention recommendations, the Environment Agency's chief executive, Lady Young, warned yesterday.
After the summer's serious flooding, the Environmental Agency faced a deluge of criticism - to the extent that flood defence chiefs were told they should pay back the huge bonuses they'd received days before the flooding - when it was revealed that it had failed to meet both its key flood defence targets.
Oxygenating (or 'aerating') shower heads are said to reduce the amount of water your shower uses, without hindering its performance. In our video review, Katie Lee puts an Oxygenics aerating shower to the test, direct from her bathroom: this one is available at £59 from Natural Collection.
In yesterday's Guardian a reader asked "Watching those pictures of water being pumped out of flood-stricken areas got me thinking: how much energy does it take to produce all our mains water?" It's a good question, and one that Leo Hickman answered after some serious calculations. Everyday in the UK we use 19 billion litres of tap water, and in one year the figure is seven cubic kilometres! Between 2% and 3% of the UK's electricity is used to process and 'deliver' this water to us in our homes, and this creates 0.5% of our carbon emissions. Hickman's conclusion was that a litre of water has a footprint of 0.298 grammes, and said "even if you had one very full bath - about 150 litres - every day for a year, overall it would represent just 15kg of greenhouse gas emissions. That's about what the average car produces over 80 kilometres."
Alan Simpson, labour MP for Nottingham South, has written in The Guardian that we need to learn from European countries about flood defences, particularly the Netherlands with 60% of its land actually below sea-level. The Dutch approach incorporates flood water into the design of new homes, in the shape of floating homes and allocated safe flood zones for excess water. In Germany, planning laws have been tightened to maintain a site’s current water soakaway capacity even if built on.
This morning I woke to an urgent text from my mother warning me that there were problems with the water supply in my area. Worried, I went to the website for our water supply company to read their ‘special situation report’.
It turned out that the torrential rain we've been having had overwhelmed their system and some rainwater had flooded a chlorine treatment tank and the resultant mixture had got into the supply before the system could be shut down. There was no need to panic, the water company advised, just to boil water for drinking and washing until further notice. They also advised anyone who felt ill to ring NHS Direct!
If you're concerned that you and your family are sending gallons of potentially useful water (literally) down the pan, help could be at hand from Hippo the Water Saver; a simple and cheap bit of kit that reduces the amount of water wasted by your loo.
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In the wake of a summer which saw many parts of Britain a bit too waterlogged for comfort, it is essential that Britain moves faster in its implementation of flood prevention recommendations, the Environment Agency's chief executive, Lady Young, warned yesterday. 
In yesterday's Guardian a reader asked "Watching those pictures of water being pumped out of flood-stricken areas got me thinking: how much energy does it take to produce all our mains water?" It's a good question, and one that Leo Hickman answered after some serious calculations. Everyday in the UK we use 19 billion litres of tap water, and in one year the figure is seven cubic kilometres! Between 2% and 3% of the UK's electricity is used to process and 'deliver' this water to us in our homes, and this creates 0.5% of our carbon emissions. Hickman's conclusion was that a litre of water has a footprint of 0.298 grammes, and said "even if you had one very full bath - about 150 litres - every day for a year, overall it would represent just 15kg of greenhouse gas emissions. That's about what the average car produces over 80 kilometres."
Alan Simpson, labour MP for Nottingham South, has written in 
This morning I woke to an urgent text from my mother warning me that there were problems with the water supply in my area. Worried, I went to 
