Yeah, low-flow toilets work great. Just flush em three times. Easy. Same with low-water washers; just wash your clothes twice. What ever happened to ole "high-boy" water closets, which did it via greater gravitational advantage? Too simple a concept, not stylish enough?

The one which really bugged me was the premature phasing out of oil-based paints, before there were reasonable exterior acrylic replacements. Yeah, you got 70% less smog-forming ingredient, but needed three times more coats, and applied five times as often, so the cumulative air pollution was in fact considerably higher. Then there was the additional ironic fact that oil-based paints were largely vegetable derived (soy alkyds, linseed oil, tung oil), while acrylics are petrochemicals per se. Those performance discrepancies eventually began to iron out, but only at considerably higher cost for equivalent quality.