Because You Care About The Environmental Impact
and Sustainable Living
Replacing just one shower head in your home, multifamily unit, institutional shower, or commercial building with a High Sierra Showerheads® model, is proven to help you reach your sustainable living goals. Our 1.5 GPM* low-flow shower heads incorporate our patented nozzle technology and a proven design that won’t become plugged. Our environmentally sound shower heads offer the satisfying feel of a conventional shower head, yet use 40% less water.
All High Sierra Showerheads® water-saving models
These savings estimates are based on two people sharing a shower, each taking a ten-minute shower daily. If more people share the shower or take prolonged or more frequent showers, you’ll save even more. (Check out “The assumptions and math behind our sustainability impact” below.)
It’s about the materials we use to make our shower. High Sierra’s Shower heads are made of metal. Their core parts are made of solid brass and stainless steel, and their tips and other decorative parts are made from heavy-duty aluminum. Our units’ non-metal parts are made from the highest quality silicone rubber, a non-reactive material widely used throughout the medical and food industry.
Nearly all other affordably-priced shower heads today are composed primarily of plastic. The shower heads with a metal look have an ultra-thin plating as a top coat to cover the plastic.
Plastics and Polymers are known for their negative impact on the environment. For cost-effectiveness, manufacturing has gradually replaced natural resources, like metal, with plastics through the years. The chemical compounds and additives found in plastic products are well documented to cause a significant toll on human health and development. Beyond the health risks, plastics break down quickly from wear, temperature fluctuations, and naturally occurring minerals found in the water supply.
Our designer shower heads are constructed of solid brass and stainless steel – not made of plastic. High Sierra Showerheads® designed its line of luxurious products to align with its commitment to be mindful of its environmental impact. Our all-metal shower heads, accessories, brushings, and adapters are not only eco-friendly but also save money, and water, while enhancing your home’s bathroom decor.
Metal shower heads like High Sierra’s are highly durable. Because you typically won’t replace them as often, they use fewer resources.
Plastic shower heads are far more breakable – When a shower head made of plastic has a chip or crack, it needs to be replaced. Each time a broken plastic shower head is thrown away, it adds waste to landfills – or worse. And each time a new plastic shower head is purchased, it results in more energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from its manufacture, transport, and packaging.
The metals in High Sierra’s shower heads are highly valued. And they’re extensively recycled.
For example, steel is the most recycled material on the planet, with an overall recycling rate of 86% in 2014. Recycling metals like steel and brass (a copper and zinc alloy) saves energy, when compared to mining and refining pure metals. And the recycled metals perform equally as well as new materials.
The plastic in other shower heads, made from fossil fuel-derived chemicals, is cheap, bulky, and unwanted after use. Only 9% of plastic gets recycled.
And unless its sources are pure, each new generation of recycled plastic typically degrades in performance. There are many different types of plastic. Sometimes, manufacturers use a mix of plastic compounds that contaminate a batch combining the reinforcements, fillers, and colorants found in some plastic products. Typically products made from plastics are discarded. Today, global plastic waste totals approximately 381 million tons per year. The U.S. is the most significant contributor. In 2010. Some 8.8 million tons of additional plastic ended up in our oceans in 2010 alone. That’s equivalent to pushing five plastic grocery bags of plastic trash directly into the oceans from every single foot of coastline around the world in that year alone. The negative environmental impact of mismanaged plastic waste and its harm to oceans, wildlife, human health, and the planet will continue to be a problem without intervention.
A 2017 United Nations conference factsheet estimated that plastic waste kills up to 1 million seabirds and 100,000 sea mammals each year, along with deaths to marine turtles and countless fish. And we humans are not immune from this impact: we’re increasingly ingesting plastic-related chemicals from the seafood we eat.
Bottom line: When choosing a shower head, consider the materials used to make it.
High Sierra Showerheads® most popular shower head model is also our smallest: the Classic PLUS™. It fits in the palm of your hand. Measuring about 3 inches long and 1 inch wide and weighing under 5 ounces, it’s one of the industry’s most compact shower heads. Both its physical and carbon footprints are sleek and minimal.
Our Classic PLUS™ is mighty for its size, immersing you in an invigorating spray of large, heavy, high-energy droplets. Customers with long or thick hair proclaim the shower spray powers off shampoo, conditioner, and other hair products better than any other water-conserving shower heads they’ve ever used. The Classic PLUS™ is also one of the best-reviewed fixed shower heads on the market today, with a Top 20 Best Rating on Amazon (among 3,000 competing models) and Best Picks from Business Insider and others!
Instead of creating oversized rain showers that look impressive – but too often drizzle out a disappointingly anemic spray – we’ve incorporated our patented technology in our design to give you a fantastic showering experience in a compact package.
And speaking of packaging.
Some shower heads come with lots of extra packaging, some of which will inevitably end up in landfills. Ours don’t.
We don’t encase our products in hard plastic cases for shelf display, which you have to cut away and discard. They’re shipped with just enough packaging to arrive at your door in good condition – and nothing else.
Our compact Classic PLUS™ model, for instance, is packed in an equally compact cardboard box that’s just big enough to hold and protect it – and not a bit larger.
Some vendors claim sustainability benefits without telling you a great deal about their basis. At High Sierra, we believe in being upfront – and thorough – around this. Here are the assumptions we made; the simple, understandable math we used; and the data on which we relied when calculating your sustainability impact from switching to one of our shower heads:
Your savings could be greater if more people share the shower, if they take longer and/or more frequent showers, if the water is left running to warm up, or if the shower head being replaced uses more than 2.5 gpm (perhaps because its flow restrictor has been removed or modified, or the shower head is an older, less efficient model).
And savings could also be less, for instance, if just one person uses the shower, or the replaced shower head is already a more efficient low-flow model that uses 2.0 gpm or less.