Designing a Long, Guilt-Free Shower

The Showerloop cleans and recycles runoff water before it hits the drain

Given the planet’s increasingly fraught water supply, five minutes is the environmentally correct length of a shower.

Americans tend to spend an average of 8.2 minutes in the shower. To shave off those extra 3.2 minutes, conservation organizations have offered up suggestions ranging from setting an egg timer to limiting your shower jam sessions to one five-minute song.

Still, it’s a drag. The ability to truly luxuriate in a 45-minute shower—long enough for a whole water-themed  playlist —seems a relic of a bygone era, when the knowledge of how badly we were screwing the planet was still only an itch at the back of our collective consciousness.

But a team of Finnish designers have hit upon a product that bridges the gap between luxury and sustainability. The Showerloop is a build-it-yourself system that reuses water that would otherwise end up in the drain, allowing for guilt-free, theoretically limitless showers.

It works by collecting water before it hits the floor of the shower, sending it through several purifying filters and out through the head in a continuous loop. Because the system is self-contained, the designers recommend using any water caught mid-cycle at the end of a shower for other household needs, like laundry or flushing the toilet.

Jason Selvarajan and a small team designed the Showerloop last summer at POC21, an “innovation camp” hosted at a French castle with the goal of developing ideas that “overcome the destructive consumer culture and make open-source, sustainable products the new normal.”

Source: CityLab

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• Technology
• Water Recycling
• Water Management