Low flow no more? Trump to roll back rules on toilets, showers and lightbulbs
Plastic straws, high flow toilets and incandescent light bulbs could make comebacks as President Donald Trump works to end certain environmental standards.
Trump called for "common sense standards on LIGHTBULBS" on his social media platform Truth Social on Tuesday and said he was instructing Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Lee Zeldin to immediately change the requirements.
The same posting called for new standards for showers, toilets, washing machines and dishwashers.
High-efficiency toilet standards were first set in 1992 under President George H.W. Bush. They required that new toilets not exceed 1.6 gallons of water used per flush. At the same time, faucets and showers were capped at 2.5 gallons per minute.
Before then, the typical American toilet used an average 3.5 gallons per flush. In 2017 the EPA estimated that the average American family could reduce its water use by 20% to 60% a year and save $110 a year in water costs.
Trump has long criticized energy-efficient light bulbs and low-flow toilets. In 2019 he claimed that Americans had to flush their toilets "10 times, 15 times as opposed to once" after the introduction of low-flow toilets.
During that roundtable on small business and red tape in 2019, Trump said new low-energy light bulbs made people look orange.
"The new bulb is many times more expensive, and, I hate to say it, it doesn't make you look as good," Trump said.
Last Monday, Trump also issued an executive order requiring federal agencies and departments to stop buying paper straws and ensure they weren't offered in their buildings. He told the head of his Domestic Policy Council to create a "national strategy to end the use of paper straws."
Trump complained to reporters in the Oval Office that paper straws "break, they explode. If something's hot, they don't last very long, like a matter of minutes, sometimes a matter of seconds. It's a ridiculous situation."
Plastic straws were never illegal in the United States, but beginning in 2018 some cities and states began banning them over concerns that they could too easily enter the oceans and harm sea life.
A photo and video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw embedded in its nostril became the face of this type of pollution, and eventually multiple states passed laws either banning plastic straws in food establishments or restricting their use to customers who specifically requested them. Many large restaurant chains nationwide switched to paper straws.
Energy-efficient bulbs have improved
Highly energy-efficient light bulbs arrived to the market in the late 1970s in response to the 1973 oil crisis, which significantly raised electricity costs, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
Initially, energy-efficient bulbs were expensive, cast bright, unflattering light and were bulky, sometimes too big to fit in lamps. But by the 2000s U.S. manufacturers were selling reasonably priced and shaped fixtures with better light quality that were extremely long-lasting compared with incandescent bulbs.
The introduction of efficient LED lights in the 2010s further shifted the U.S. market toward energy-efficient lighting.
In 2022, the Department of Energy issued rules that began a phaseout of energy-wasting lightbulbs by requiring that lightbulbs sold in the United States meet new, higher minimum-efficiency standards by 2028.
Work to set those standards began in 2007 under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 under President George W. Bush.