Greenwashing

Ok, so few months ago (maybe even a year now), the building owner for our office downtown decided to revamp the (perfectly functional) bathrooms. Probably one of those things you wouldn't catch anyone doing anymore. In any case, they replaced the counters with granite, new sinks, new faucets, new soap dispensers, new paper towel dispenser. It took several months for them to finish the work.

Someone put some acidic thing down on the counter and it has this nice little etched ring on it. Oops. Guess some cleaners don't play nice with natural stone. But that doesn't affect the functionality.

One thing that irks me, and the reason for this post, is the soap dispensers and towel dispenser are automatic. The faucets however aren't. So you turn on the faucet with your dirty hands, get soap automatically, wash, rinse, and then you're supposed to get paper from the automatic dispenser (a few feet away) and turn the faucet off with the paper towel, throw that out since you picked up the dirt from the faucet, get another piece of paper towel, and dry your hands... Why not just make the faucet automatic too? Plus, the soap dispensers mis-fire all the time - it's not uncommon for them to shoot 3 or 4 squirts of soap into the sink as I rinse. So I have to contort myself to keep my hands under the streams of the faucet (more on that in a sec) without setting off the soap dispenser. Then is the towel dispenser. It'll dispense randomly. You enter the bathroom and 'whirrrrr' out comes some paper - just for opening the door. Not a big deal, I guess, except that it dispenses about 30% more paper than I actually need to dry my hands. And sometimes it feeds from two rolls at the same time, so I get 3x the amount of paper I need. Yay for the 'environmental' solution.

I don't quite get the whole automatic soap dispenser thing anyway. You're getting soap, that you will use to clean your hands. It shouldn't really matter if you have to push on a button or pull a lever, since you will clean your hands after said pushing or pulling. And it runs on batteries. So the whole automatic soap thing to me is a giant failure.

Back to the multiple streams of water. Part of this eco-remodel of the bathrooms involved putting little shower head bubblers on the faucets, so that instead of one gentle stream, you get 10 small sharp streams. The result is a lot more splashing, and a generally unpleasant hand washing experience. I guess that's one way to save water, make it so thoroughly unpleasant that you do it as little as possible. That would explain why one of the faucets doesn't have hot water at all, it's been shut off since they "improved" the bathrooms. I guess it dripped. The one faucet with hot water also drips if you're not super careful about how you turn it off. Good thing they installed those water saving shower stream bubbler gizmos, on broken faucets.