The shiffter makes toilet cleaning easier but it’s also about environmentally-friendly toilet cleaning. If you’ve been looking for an eco-friendly toilet brush, the shiffter is a bigger step forward as there’s no throwaway brush and therefore less environmental impact. Aside from reducing plastic waste from brushes and reducing the use of bleach and toilet cleaner, there are several other green benefits from using a jet of water rather than a brush. Take a look at the annual environmental savings per year – and these are just for the UK – and that’s on top of making toilet cleaning much less unpleasant!
About 30% of water used in a home is for flushing the toilet
The shiffter has the potential to reduce water usage in the UK by around 150 billion litres a year. This will not only save water, but the energy that goes into processing it. How can this be achieved?
We’re all familiar with repeat flushing, when the flush hasn’t cleaned the toilet bowl properly. Sometimes you have to do this more than once and most of the time it’s in vain, but if you can clean it using a small jet of water rather than repeat flushing with several litres of water – in millions of toilets at home, at work or in the leisure sector – it all adds up.
We’ve mentioned that 30% of the water we use at home is used to flush the toilet but let’s remember – this is the same, high-quality water that comes out of our taps!
Cleaning straight after you get up from the toilet using a shiffter means that you won’t need to scrub the toilet with bleach or toilet cleaner. This will save you money, time and reduce the amount of chemicals that go into the sewage system.
According to Statista, in the UK, in 2020, an estimated:
Cleaning the toilet using a shiffter means that you don’t need to use bleach or toilet cleaner any way near as often, because you just jet wash the toilet clean immediately after use.
If each household reduced bleach/toilet cleaner use by just one bottle a year, that would add up to nearly 21 million litres of it – but that’s just in the UK!
Toilet brushes get pretty dirty. With some costing as little as £1, it’s easy to just throw them away and buy a new one. Even expensive toilet brushes come with replaceable heads, which can be thrown away and replaced cheaply.
Numerous websites recommend replacing toilet brushes every six months (with every three months recommended for commercial washrooms). For £1 brushes, we can imagine it being more frequent – especially when you consider the effort taken to clean them.
The shiffter will last several years (expected to be at least five) and will be made from recycled and recyclable plastic, so over its lifetime it could save almost 70,000 tonnes of non-recyclable plastic, or 13,900 tonnes a year.2
Less bleach means fewer bottles, so if we don’t need to buy so much bleach it reduces the need for 27.8 million bleach or toilet cleaner bottles a year1 equating to 834 tonnes of single use plastics.
Reducing bleach and toilet cleaner usage by that amount a year will also save on the costs and CO2 emissions of making and transporting almost 24,000 tonnes (the combined weight) of the chemicals and bottles.
The shiffter is probably the most environmentally-friendly toilet brush ever, because there is no brush. Our different approach will make a huge impact.
There are 27.8 million households in the UK and the average household comprises 2.4 people*. We each flush five times a day (on average)✝ with cisterns holding six litres of water per flush. ✝
Multiplying the figures together shows we flush over 2 billion litres of water down the toilet every day in the UK. This equates to over 730 billion litres1 of water flushed every year.
How about the US? The US has 128 million households and a household size of 3.23. If everyone in the US flushed once less a day, it would save over 905 billion litres, or 239 billion gallons, of water each year.
*ONS figures ✝data from various sources
1 Based on an average 750ml bottle size
2 Based on a brush weight of 250g. Many brushes are heavier and some lighter.
So you can see from above that when it comes to eco-friendly toilet brushes, the shiffter has huge environmental benefits as well as being great for cleaning the toilet. But there’s more – we also want to give money to good causes.
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