Minister Harbers: Washing cars with rainwater should become the norm

Minister Mark Harbers (Infrastructure and Water Management) demands that it must become normal for citizens and companies to use rainwater much more frequently than drinking water. For example for the car wash.

He wants to reduce drinking water consumption by 20 percent by 2035. For this reason, rainwater must be used, for example, to flush toilets or to cool factories. The minister wants to start “raising awareness and offering alternatives”, but does not rule out that it will be required by law to design new houses accordingly.

Clean drinking water is too often used to wash cars

According to the minister, the “ultimately clean and well-purified” drinking water is now used too often, and rainwater is also sufficient. “The question is how clean should the water be where you sat down Car wash along.” Harbers believes that people and businesses are perfectly willing to adapt, but that the alternatives are not being offered now. “Give people a good system so that they don’t have to flush drinking water down the toilet by default,” says the minister as an example.

Harbers therefore wants to critically question the building regulations together with Minister Hugo de Jonge (public housing). “We’ll see if we can make it a common practice that we design housing from the outset that drinking water isn’t used for substandard applications,” says Harbers. The minister therefore also wants the cabinet to change the building law in order to give this development a “boost”.

Increase the price

Drinking water consumption can also be reduced by raising the price, but Harbers is less enthusiastic about this. “I’m in favor of keeping drinking water affordable for households.” That’s why the minister wants to start looking seriously at other, less drastic options for reducing drinking water consumption.

Wash your car in the car wash

Many car washes no longer use drinking water, but instead clean the used drinking water. This already saves drinking water. But even more can be saved with the car wash, namely money. Read here why you should never choose the expensive program in the car wash.