What if I told you that by making a very small sacrifice each day, you could benefit the planet and your wallet? That’s something we can all feel good about, right? A good place to start is evaluating our personal water consumption. What we can directly control.
It is difficult to estimate how much water an individual uses while washing their hands. Flow-rates of different faucet types vary wildly and so does the amount of time people devote to washing their hands and the frequency in which they do it. I know that in my household, running the tap for a consistent 20-seconds (the ideal hand-washing time recommended by the CDC) would pump out approximately 4 liters of water (~1 gallon).
If I were, let’s say, to be a little crazy and shut off the tap for the 16 seconds while my hands were out of water lathering soap, simple math says I could reduce the water consumption of this activity by 80%. This is not a trick. It really is that straight forward.
By the way, my philosophy is not to attack people, but to educate them. If you are a habitual tap-runner, I am not here to reprimand you. If you think you could appreciate a new eco-savvy challenge in your life, then please keep reading.
If your taps are anything like mine, the simple act of shutting them off while washing your hands could literally save thousands of litres of water from being wasted every year. I live in a semi-arid region of Canada where water is quite expensive, so this little sacrifice is also putting money right back into my pocket with the added benefit of limiting water waste.
Let’s get more risque and assume you brush your teeth morning and night for 60 seconds each. If I kept my bathroom tap running while I did this, that would be ~24 litres of water running down the drain with not much of a job to do. Project that over a full year and imagine how much water that is: 8700 liters (~2200 gallons) just from one person brushing their teeth. If we add the amount of water that would be wasted running the taps washing hands eight (nine, ten?) times a day, now we’re talking about enough water to fill a swimming pool. Every year. From two daily activities.
I apologize for the math lesson, but I believe perspective helps when trying to defend my point. Another perspective I find inspiring is understanding why we should care about conserving water in the first place. Beyond just saving money with the simple adjustment of shutting off the taps, we could be contributing to future water security. This is something we should all care about.
Two out of every three people in the world live in an area that suffers from freshwater scarcity, at least during part of the year (Mekonnen & Hoekstra 2016). Some of our local municipalities may not enforce water restrictions in the drier months, but that does not mean our surface and groundwater reserves are not being stressed. They are. And the continuing pressure of climate change is only exacerbating the issue (Mekonnen & Hoekstra 2016).
We can look forward to more expensive freshwater and limited access to it. This is true for much of the planet. We have more people than ever before, using more water than ever before, and the security of our resources has never been less certain. Doing our part matters. After all, there is no human alive today that can survive without water. We all deserve safe and reliable access to it. This is precisely why monitoring our water consumption is the selfless and loving thing to do. Every liter of water we conserve now helps build our lifeline for the unpredictable future ahead, when we may really need to rely on it.
The fact that we live in a world that is far from fair, and freshwater is not equitably distributed, is sad. But this is why I personally feel convicted to reduce my water waste. I have the privilege (and luxury) of having clean freshwater on-demand. I challenge myself every day to not abuse that. If we were all on board with making these simple sacrifices, and not taking our freshwater privileges for granted, we can make a very tangible difference.
Now, if everything I have talked about above has piqued your curiosity about water conservation and you want to know more ways you can reduce your consumption, listen up! If you have a lawn, stick to only watering it in the early morning or late afternoon. Sunrise and sunset are perfect times. This will ensure you get the most efficient use out of your water, and will prevent the majority of it from being evaporated away before it percolates into the soil.
If you rely on machines for your cleaning, only run dishwashers and washing machines when you have a full load.
If you enjoy a nice shower, try only showering once a week. Just kidding. But shortening your shower by even one minute certainly helps.
There are so many ways we can reduce our consumption of freshwater, especially in the spring and summer when we typically use much more of it. Once we start with the little sacrifices, the rest will come in stride. Soon we will no longer have to challenge ourselves, it will just become our second nature.
We may even naturally progress into stepping up our conservation game. If you’re willing to spend a little cash, investing in catch basins (or water barrels) to capture rain water, and using this for gardening and lawn purposes is a great idea. Once you got it, it’s free! Substituting your faucets, taps, and shower-heads with low-flow alternatives can also save a surprising amount of water. The opportunities abound!
. . .
Maybe some of these minor changes have never occurred to you, or maybe you struggle with believing they will accumulate to much of a difference. If you are wrestling with the latter, I hope to change that. By the end of 2020 the world may have 7.8 billion people in it. Approximately 4 billion of them face water security issues. If the 3.8 billion people who don’t were to limit their consumption by even even a few gallons a day, globally we would save enough water to fill Lake Erie in less than 15 years. See the big picture now?
For those of you who may already practice water conservation in and around your home — I applaud you. Keep it up! The reason why I am writing this piece is because in movies, TV shows, and all over the media, we don’t see such practices. Running taps on TV is still commonplace and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. But this has me thinking that representation is so important and influential. If we never encounter different ways of ‘doing life’ than we may never learn there is a better, more efficient way to do it.
So, this is my two cents: turn the taps off. Let’s all do our part in safeguarding our freshwater resources the best we can. I believe we can have our cake and eat it too.
References:
Mekonnen, M.M. and A.Y. Hoekstra. 2016. Four billion people facing severe water scarcity. Science Advances. 2:e1500323
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This post was previously published on Greener Together and is republished here with permission from the author.
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