The Water Efficient Kitchen Project

Abstract

The usable portion of water on earth is only about 200 000 km3 of water — less than 1 per cent of all freshwater and only 0.01 per cent of all water on Earth. In western world, water is used in a way that can be seen as unsustainable. Planners always assumed that growing demand would be met by taming more of the hydrological cycle through building more infrastructures, but this practice has many side effects. Western society does not value the water. In the European households, it is many times used inefficiently. Students are one of the groups that for different reasons use it in what can be considered an inefficient way. The goal of this project is to “Design a system that makes the use of water in a European student house’s kitchen more efficient, with the subsequent energy savings”. Due the broadness of this scope, the Netherlands and Spain are chosen as case studies to understand and compare the differences between Northern and Southern Europe in terms of management of resources and cultural behaviors towards water use. It is decided to “inform the context of water use in a student house’s kitchen in the Netherlands and in Spain”, meaning defining those aspects that may influence the experience of a person using water. For this project, five levels are chosen: 1 - Situation of water 2 - Situation of energy 3 - Water spending tasks carried out in the kitchen 4 - Products related to these tasks 5 – User’s performance of the task. The situation of water and energy is studied to get a clear picture at a country and household level, gathering data about production and consumption. An analysis is done to identify the water-spending tasks carried out in the kitchen by following the flow of food. This is based on the statement “the kitchen is the place where Dutch people store food and cooking utensils, prepare meals and process the remnants from the meals” (Vision on sustainable product innovation, Kathalys 2001). Then, an analysis of the products related to water spending tasks is done to learn what the availability in the market is, interesting technologies applied in terms of water and energy savings, and the outstanding examples. After this, an extent study over six students from each country is carried out to “map the context of water use in a student’s house kitchen”, and with this, understand the problem from the user perspective. From these previous studies, conclusions are taken and causes are identified. Due to the lack of data to base a prioritization, a laboratory test is carried out. In this test, the consumption of the most performed water spending tasks is measured. Only the most common identified techniques for each country are analyzed, therefore, there is a differentiation between the Dutch and the Spanish context. After identifying the causes of the problem, the water waste is measured and the causes prioritized. The possibility of reusing water is studied with the help of a technique called differentiation. The result of the research process is a list of the most important causes of inefficiency in water use, which are, in order of weight: 1 - Choice of the in the technique used to carry out a certain task 2 - Tasks where two hands and the tap are involved 3 - Waste of water that has undesired temperature 4 - Inaccuracy in water measurements 5 - Ignorance of the possible reuses of low risk water After these analyses, the problem is defined, and the design process begins. The result is a concept that joins four different sub-systems together, to solve the main causes of inefficiency in water use. With this concept, in theory, the overall efficiency of the use of water can be maximized to nearly 100%, and the consumption can be lowered to the minimums. However, the quantified savings will always depend on the cultural concept of cleanness of each country