All Gender Restrooms - Conversations with Project Teams

Our project is a thermally integrated geothermal campus plant building that includes offices for the Athletic Operations shops, storage and personnel at a University Campus.  The University values integrated sustainability, equity and inclusion, in addition to academic excellence.  In total there are only 14 personnel, maximum in the building.  So originally we had only 2 individual restrooms, both were identical and gender neutral with 1.6 g/1.28 gpf water closet and sink.  As design developed we became aware of this credit and targeted it for achievement.  However, we had to overcome some challenges. First, the overall sustainability plan for this East Campus included a minimum of 40% potable water use reduction goal. As I think we all know, this is not possible without using urinals and a lower flow water closet.  A second challenge was overcoming the client's low-flush fear based on experience with past low-flow fixtures and older plumbing. Additionally, most women would not choose to have a urinal in the restoom.  And third, since the project was also pursuing the bicycle credit, we needed to add one or two showers and a urinal in each restroom. 

At this point, the team had its work cut out for them.  The building core design was compact and finding space for the urinals and a shower was difficult.  But with only 14 personnel, only one shower was required. By reworking the locker room configeration, a shower was added to one of the restrooms and urinals were added to both.  Each restroom also had space enough to add a sanitary product dispenser and a disposal unit.  We looked at many combinations of fixture flow and flush rates.  We focused on Water Sense fixtures and ultra-low flow for efficiency and performance. For water closets we targeted Water Sense, siphon jet and 800-1000 Map scores for efficacy.  After providing 3 of the best "combination packages" to the University for discussion, we are at 40% reduction.  After the University discussed showerhead flows with other universities, they elected to specify a proprietary product for the showerhead (meets Water Sense efficiency and efficacy) with 1.0 gpm flow rate, which brought the project to a 45% total indoor water use reduction.

While we had some challenges, the client highly valued sustainability, equity and inclusion. So we had the perfect client to want to use All Gender Restrooms. In my opinion, for too long some clients have "talked the talk "regarding DEI, but employees and new-hires EXPECT them to deliver on these initiatives. As more and more clients adopt DEI as a core value, All Gender Restrooms are one valuable way they can demonstrate their commitment to "walk the talk". I make it a practice before I meet with a new client to check out their website so that I can bring up issues such as this and ask how they are addressing those issues in the current project.

On the topic of incorporating All-Gender Restrooms, I find it is helpful that clients are starting to be exposed to this concept in thier daily lives (i.e. University projects, modern restaurants, etc.). The concept is starting to sink in as standard, expecially when in combination with typical male / female restroom banks. Having these All Gender Restrooms double as shower / changing areas has also helped the cause in my experience.

Our team recently pursued this pilot for a small new construction project - for bulidings that have a limited bathroom footprint and no uriinals in scope (1-2 bathrooms total) it was feasible to install all-gender signage and meet the pilot credit requirements for menstrual hygeine materials after discussion with the client. Single-occupant bathrooms also allow occupant access to private changing areas as noted above.