Take This Story With You to the John

This is the tale of how one college student invented a device that generates electricity — one flush at a time.

There are a lot of toilets in the world, and because nature calls a few times a day, that means a there's a whole lot of flushing going on. It's one of those things you do without thinking much about it — unless it doesn't work, of course.

Tom Broadbent, on the other hand, thought quite a bit about flushing toilets. No, he's not a plumber; he's a graduating industrial design student who found a way to use toilet flushing to actually generate electricity!

As GreenBiz reports, Broadbent, who's at Leicester's De Montfort University, has developed something called the HighDro Power, a device that "uses an in-line turbine to generate electricity from falling waste water in the soil pipes of high-rise buildings."

You might think that Broadbent came up with this idea while on the toilet, but that's not the case. As he's quoted in the article, "The inspiration for HighDro Power was literally a 'Eureka!' moment that came when I emptied a bath in a hotel and found that it cleared very quickly and with a large amount of force. It seemed logical that this energy should be harnessed in some way to create green electricity and help governments meet targets and it filled an obvious gap in the market."

Should he fill that gap in the market, it's estimated that his device could save up to £926 (or about $1,430) per year for a seven-story building, or be used for "feed-in tariffs" (where the electricity would be sold back to the national grid). That's not a lot, but it's a start.

This is more good news on the restroom front, as last week we reported on the NYC's Riverside Clay Tennis Association's proposed carbon neutral bathroom complex. Broadbent's system still needs to be tested in an actual building, but if it works, this gives people even more reason to not forget to flush.

This story first appeared on tonic.com.