In World Environment Month, hansgrohe’s Green Vision Delivers Sustainable Innovation
The month of June marks two important dates connected to environmental awareness – World Environment Day on June 5 and World Oceans Day on June 8. It’s a time to seriously consider the question about how we can contribute to a greener planet and protect our most precious resource – water.
This continues to be the main preoccupation and driving force for hansgrohe as it strives to develop bathroom products that do not compromise on beautiful design aesthetics or function, address evolving lifestyle needs, but consistently meet conservation objectives. hansgrohe’s campaign, Green Vision Beyond Water: Rethinking Bathroom Culture in collaboration with Stuttgard based design and innovation studio, Phoenix was launched this year, presenting a unique bathroom concept that takes sustainable innovation into a new realm, while championing and encouraging sustainable behavioral change.
The concept was borne as a response to several conflicting questions: How important is the personal need for hygiene? How important will it be for people to have a place of retreat at home that protects them from sensory overload and provides mental peace? How can these needs be combined as efficiently as possible to meet the challenge of increasing urbanization and the resulting smaller living spaces? And: How can this be achieved without compromising personal needs at the expense of resources such as water and energy?
A Bathroom in Harmony with Humans and Nature
hansgrohe and Phoenix have developed a bathroom that is in harmony with humans and nature: it goes far beyond the sustainability triad “Reduce, Reuse and Recycle”. It’s all about “rethinking” – rethinking and questioning our daily routines and rituals in the bathroom as we know them today, because only through sustainable behavioral change can we reduce our carbon footprint in the long run.
Rethinking the Bathroom
In order to rethink the bathroom, hansgrohe gained an understanding of what the bathroom stands for today and the habits that will be the future drivers of a sustainable bathroom. To shed light on sustainable bathroom rituals from different perspectives, a qualitative analysis was conducted. The exchange with various experts and pioneers from the fields of sustainability, health and architecture combined with personal interviews formed the basis for the conception of the hansgrohe Green Vision. Four areas of insight could be derived from these comprehensive results:
Beyond Water: In the bathroom, mental needs are satisfied through resource-intensive rituals. It serves as a place of retreat, an emotional cocoon. We create a new place that focuses on mental hygiene and enables regeneration that conserves resources.
Conscious Hygiene: Convenient hygiene rituals are firmly anchored in everyday life and have a very high water consumption. A new type of water-saving hygiene not only helps the environment, but also keeps our skin healthy. We create new, simple routines for this.
Warm Nest: Nowhere is the physical and emotional need for warmth greater than in the bathroom. At the same time, today’s bathrooms are often very cold due to the choice of colors and materials – which is compensated for by intensive heating or high hot water consumption. hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water creates a place of well-being that lets the user feel both physical warmth and security, with minimal energy consumption.
Empowering Knowledge: Even people who live their lives with the environment in mind often have no awareness of their concrete resource consumption. To enable a sustainable change in behavior, water consumption must be made tangible.
“With hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water, we are ending the age of ego-centric hot water consumption in the bathroom for the pure satisfaction of hygiene and wellness needs. A bathroom that uses 90 percent less water and energy than today’s bathrooms, and thus saves 90 percent CO2, is our consistent response to, and vision for, upcoming water and energy crises.”
Steffen Erath, Head of Innovation & Sustainability at hansgrohe SE
“Global warming and our use of resources must be reconsidered. The sanitary industry will have to develop new solutions that are not only produced more sustainably, but above all enable more efficient use of resources in the bathroom. With our Green Vision, we are accompanying hansgrohe in making the challenges that this rethinking entails tangible and address them in a targeted manner.”
Mathias Oesterle, Design Director of Phoenix
“Our award-winning Innovation Lab works like a start-up. It uses a clearly defined innovation process to develop sustainable concepts that are aimed not only at the user but also at the planet. Our innovative technologies help people change behaviors that harm the environment and at the same time experience the bathroom as a place to relax.”
Hans Jürgen Kalmbach, Chairman of the Executive Board of hansgrohe SE
About the Hansgrohe Group – Setting the Beat of Water. Since 1901. With its brands AXOR and hansgrohe, the Hansgrohe Group, based in Schiltach/Southern Germany, enjoys a reputation as a leader in innovation, design and quality within the bath and kitchen industry. Founded in 1901 in the Black Forest, the company gives water form and function with its faucets, showerheads and shower systems. The 120-year history of the company is marked by innovations, such as the first hand-held shower with multiple spray types, the first pull-out kitchen faucet, and the first wall bar to hold a hand-held shower.The company holds more than 18,500 active property rights. The Hansgrohe Group stands for long-lasting quality products and for responsibility towards people and the environment. Sustainable production of resource-conserving products is central to the company’s business activities around the globe. With 34 subsidiaries and 20 sales offices supplying products in 152 countries, the globally active company in the sanitary industry is a reliable partner to its customers in all regions of the world. The Hansgrohe Group, its brands and products have won numerous awards, including more than 700 design prizes since 1974. The products of the Hansgrohe Group are found worldwide: on renowned cruise ships, in luxurious 5-star and boutique hotels, in international metropolitan cities, in extraordinary spas, exclusive bathrooms of lodges and luxury villas, public facilities, as well as in countless private homes. The Group’s high quality standards are ensured by seven wholly-owned production facilities: four in Germany, one each in France, the United States and China. In 2021, the Hansgrohe Group generated a turnover of EUR 1.365 billion. It employs around 5,400 people worldwide, about 60 percent of whom work in Germany.
About Phoenix Phoenix is a product innovation studio that turns brands into winners of tomorrow’s wellbeing mega-economy. Since 1987 we have been driven by Logic, Moral and Magic - our design philosophy which sums up our notion of design excellence: lucid solutions with love for humanity and that special something. As an independent, award-winning studio, Phoenix makes the foggy future visible for its partners, accompanying them from idea to market success. Today, the team of around 70 international design experts reinvent the future of wellbeing in Stuttgart, Munich and Shanghai and thus stand for excellent design - as confirmed by over 900 design awards.