The time I chose to visit Australia was one of mass drought. Water saving was of utmost priority, and every drop was accounted for. When my Australian friends visited me during our 'drought', they scoffed that our water saving measures tended to extend as far as - not using the garden hose. My friends concluded that we Brits didn't even know the meaning of water saving, and our concerns existed purely on a superficial basis. I contested that this was because our droughts weren't so dangerous as those in a land mass made up of mostly arid desert, but I still didn't know many examples of British concern for water usage to back up my weak argument.
The growing awareness of our need to conserve the resources handed to us by mother nature, however, has increased the number of water saving gadgets on the market. It's time to encompass these gadgets into our lives and put us Brits back on the water saving map. Click on the image below to start our gallery of the best new gadgets around.



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."
There's one unavoidable problem with low-flush lavatories that doesn't delight even the greenest among us: they, er, don't flush very well. I discovered this to my cost on a recent visit to a green restaurant which I won't name, because I really like the place, and wouldn't want to use anything as trivial as a toilet against them. But let's just say it put me off my lunch...
From: WIN two tickets for Headstock Festival featuring Echo and the Bunnymen