The outfit I used to work for had two facilities about ten miles apart. The brand new one was hyper-green.... like 510nM green....with every trick, tactic, ploy, and plan to "conserve." It even had a compost heap on the roof, carefully tended by volunteers (brownie points!), different waste systems for plastic, aluminum, paper, and just plain garbage. The lights turned on and off by motion detectors, and the toilet faucets had those IR sensors which would turn the water on and off automatically.
This building had won many green awards, posted prominently in the lobby.
The other, older building was what you might charitably call "brown." Dark brown. Oh, you know, toilets with full pressure flushers which would give a satisfying roar as they gobbled down the stuff, manual light switches, and faucets you turned on and off manually.
OK, but every once in a while a big meeting would be called at the "brown" building, and since I shuffled back and forth between the two buildings, I had occasion to notice that whenever a meeting was held in the brown building, almost every time I went to the john, I'd find the faucets running.
The folks from the green building, who had gotten used to the automatic faucets, would leave them on, expecting them to shut off, stick their hands under the noisy blow-dryers, and leave.
Sometimes there were even two faucets left running.
Lord only knows how much water was used up because of this.
Truly it is said (by me), that going green is sometimes like a kid's party balloon. You push in here, and it comes out there.
Terry
