Flush with success

"Urinals use 150,000 liters of water a year on average, anywhere in the world," says Borschberg, who studied at Ecole hoteliere de Lausanne.

"In a busy club, this can go up to 300,000 liters. We measured it at M1NT and that's how much it was recording there, before we changed it."

The five Falcon urinals they installed will save the private members' club at least 750,000 liters a year. While the shareholders won't care much about the financial benefits, at least they are doing something good for Mother Nature, and mother China.

"We realized that water is super cheap in China. When I last checked, one cubic meter (1,000 liters) cost 3.45 yuan," says Borschberg.

"It's so cheap that it makes it hard for green-friendly technologies to be implemented and be financially sound, so we had to find a model that worked for everyone."

His original idea was somewhat different. Inspired by Sanifair, which has been providing clean public toilets on Germany's autobahns for the last decade, he wanted to adopt a similar blueprint and bring it over.

In only took him a few days' navigating Beijing's public lavatories to realize there was a demand. According to the concept, people pay a small user fee to cover service and maintenance, for example 1 yuan, and receive a voucher worth the same amount that can be redeemed at any of the company's partner firms, usually neighboring shops.