Toilet Replacement Vouchers Available for Low Income and Senior Property Owners
Promoting water conservation remains a priority as we seek to reduce citywide water consumption by five percent in preparation for the shutdown of the Delaware Aqueduct, which is currently planned for 2022. To aid in those efforts, we recently announced $1 million in funding for a Toilet Replacement Program that provides $125 vouchers to low-income and senior property owners to encourage them to replace their older toilets with high-effirciency models. Older, inefficient toilets can use anywhere from 3.5 to 5 gallons of water per flush while modern high-efficiency WaterSense® certified models consume only 1.28 gallons of water per flush, or less. Installing a WaterSense® certified toilet can save approximately 40 gallons of water each day.
The program is targeted at approximately 4,300 3- and 4-family property owners citywide. These property owners are already enrolled in our Home Water Assistance Program, which provides a $115.89 bill credit annually to low-income, senior, and disabled households. We have begun mailing Toilet Replacement Program information to eligible properties and the initiative will continue through May 2019, or while funding lasts.
Our toilet replacement programs, in addition to other water conservation efforts, have helped overall water use in the city decline from more than 1.5 billion gallons a day in 1980 to roughly 1 billion gallons a day at present. This significant reduction occurred while the city’s population grew from just over 7.1 million to 8.5 million in the same period.
Water conservation efforts not only help to ensure an adequate supply of healthy drinking water, they also reduce the amount of electricity, chemicals, and other costs associated with operating the water system. A five percent reduction in water demand in New York City will decrease carbon emissions from the wastewater treatment process by more than 15,500 metric tons per year, the equivalent of removing 3,300 cars from the road or planting more than 400,000 trees and letting them grow for ten years.
