Ideas for stealing: rain barrel in the gutter

Crime scene: the office rain barrel.

I originally decided to get one because we were working on B Corp certification and it felt like an easy win. A quick walk to the hardware store during a lunch break, we put it up in the backyard, posted about it on Insta, added the points to our count. Case closed.

At least so I thought.

A few weeks later, the barrel disappeared.

We eventually found it hidden in the garage. One of the neighbors must have been annoyed by it and taken it away. We never found out why, but we just took it back. This time we added a lock.

Then someone covered it up. Right before a rainy weekend.

I was so annoyed, but we uncovered it – only for it to get covered up again.

At some point, the whole thing felt ridiculous, but I still wasn’t ready to give up on it.

Our goal, besides the B Corp points, was clear: collect water in the spring, then use it to water the trees during the dry summer.

As you can imagine, when summer came, there was hardly any rain and hardly any water in our rain barrel. All that effort for almost nothing.

Last weekend I was walking in Haarlem and suddenly stopped when I saw a rain barrel built straight into a gutter. Not added on. Not sitting around in the yard. Just part of the building.

No one can move it. No one can hide it. It doesn’t rely on anyone remembering to use it. It's there and it works – whether you want it or not!

It's brilliant! It fixes the actual issue, which isn’t awareness or good intentions – it’s design. If water collection is built into infrastructure, it becomes normal automatically.

Which makes me wonder: why isn’t this the default already?
Why don’t we just build every gutter like this?

Because this is how things actually change – when the sustainable option stops being extra effort and just becomes the new normal.