My first thought when reading about this new facility having more than 1,000 toilets and urinals is how much water it must consume. Using ballpark figures, if a combination of new toilets and urinals use approximately 50,000 gallons of water per year, 1,000 such fixtures would consume around 50,000,000 gallons of water per year.
That’s a huge amount of water for one facility and is occurring in a country that is facing enormous environmental issues when it comes to water. China already has frequent water shortages along with dangerous levels of water pollution. And the problem is not just environmental; insufficient water is limiting China’s industrial and agricultural output in some areas, and some believe this problem may pose as great a threat to China's high economic growth rate as the current worldwide economic downturn.
Instead of boasting that they have built the largest restroom in the world, a more strategic and meaningful move in China would be to take a leadership role in installing highly efficient, water-reducing toilets and low-water—and even better, no-water—urinals. China has nearly 1.4 billion people. Using water wisely and carefully on a per capita basis is probably more important in China than it is anywhere else in the world.