The Campus Bathroom Retrofit Project is a student-led initiative by Students for Sustainability's water-focused committee, the Hydrocats. These students worked with Facilities Management (FM) to locate and update inefficient toilet fixtures and water usage data on campus. Hydrocats members measured toilet fixture counts and flush rate data in buildings across campus and found Koffler to be in greatest need for replacement fixtures. FM has since replaced the fifty high-water-use toilets and urinals in the building with newer, more effective fixtures, cutting the water used in the bathrooms by 69.2%. The new toilets use only 1.28 gallons of water per flush, and the urinals use less than one pint of water per flush. Each year, this project saves about 263,000 gallons of water, reducing the Koffler Building’s overall water usage by one third.
Through this project, the Hydrocats students were able to collaborate with FM and Tucson Water to make the University of Arizona campus more water efficient and lower our overall water footprint.
In total, 38 inefficient toilets and 12 flushing urinals in the Koffler building were replaced, resulting in an avoided water usage of about 263,000 gallons per year, accounting for a 69.2% reduction of water usage in Koffler’s bathroom fixtures, and over one-third water usage reduction in the building overall.
