College Students Asked to Urinate in Showers to Save Water

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Two college students have come up with a plan that they say will save 720 million liters (about 187 million gallons) of water every year. Their radical new idea? Pee in the shower.

Debs Torr and Chris Dobson, two students at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, started the Go with the Flow campaign to inspire the school’s 15,000 students to urinate during their morning showers instead of in the toilet, BBC reports.

“We’ve done the maths, and this project stands to have a phenomenal impact,” Dobson told BBC. “With 15,000 students at UEA, over a year we would save enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool 26 times over.”

He admits movement has been “divisive,” igniting passions in the age-old debate about whether or not it’s socially acceptable to pee in the shower. Though a school spokesperson told BBC that the university supports Dobson and Torr, Dobson made a concession to the skeptics who want to keep the firm separation of church and state between where they pee and where they shampoo: “We would encourage that every person using the same shower consents to the challenge and if not that they don’t take part.”

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Write to Tessa Berenson at tessa.Rogers@time.com