Education Center

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the commercial and institutional sector — which includes office buildings, schools, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, laboratories, and so on — is the second largest consumer of publicly supplied water in the U.S., accounting for 17 percent of the withdrawals from public water supplies. With the exception of restaurants, where most water is used in the  kitchen, the biggest category of water usage is Domestic/Restroom. In office buildings, for example, 37 percent of water use falls into this category. For schools, it’s 45 percent. 

Written by: Carol J Alexander

Chicago’s McCormick Place is the premier convention facility in North America. It includes over 2.6 million square feet of exhibit halls, six ballrooms, 170 meeting rooms, a 4,188-seat theatre, and assembly seating for 18,000 people. Not all of the over 250 convention centers in the US are this massive, but they all do have something in common—they get a lot of traffic, which demands a durable faucet in the restrooms.

Installing, managing, and maintaining any public restroom can be a challenge. However, when you consider high-traffic restrooms in places such as amusement parks, convention centers, and airports, the sheer number of people who utilize the facilities can be staggering. As an engineer specifying the type and number of sinks, toilets, urinals, faucets, and other features of a high-traffic restroom, you’ll want to make sure the following items are on your short-list.

Across the USA, there are only 8,000 schools and childcare centers that are regulated under the Safe Water Drinking Act (SWDA).

As businesses take their first cautious steps back to some sense of normalcy following the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, facility managers will be responsible for re-opening buildings that may have been unoccupied for months.