Knight-Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTONIn 1992 Congress passed a law requiring every new residential toilet made in America to use only 1.6 gallons of water per flush a significant drop from the old 3.5gallon standard.
Now, a backwash is flooding Washington. Thirty-four members of Congress have co-signed legislation that would repeal the new standard and leave ordinary Americans in control of the size of their flush. "There's good regulation and there's bad regulation," said Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich.
"To me this is an example of government run amok."
Knollenberg claims the regulations were set down with little public input or research. He says his constituents want the government out of their bathrooms.
He and the other flush rebels in Congress have offered some striking anecdotal reasons for scrapping the new toilets.
Adults said their aged parents had to flush multiple times. A fourth-grader wrote in on lined and dotted composition paper: "I'm one out of five children, and the toilets get stopped up every week!"
But most plumbing manufacturers and environmentalists support the new rules. Toilet makers don t want to deal with a maze of different state regulations that might require the manufacturing of a dozen different toilet sizes.
And environmentalists point to huge water savings from the new models, with New York City cutting water use by 7 percent since it began reducing the volume of flushes.