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Green Living Certification Chapter 4 - Simple Changes |
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Page 2 of 7 |
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4.1 Water |
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Water is one of the most precious resources we have, yet most of us don't think twice about letting the water run while we wash a coffee mug, or watering our lawns in the summer. Americans, in fact, use about 130 percent more water than we did just 50 years ago. Given that water resources are being depleted, that's a significant increase with global implications. It's not something that can be remedied without humans - all of us - trying to reduce our consumption. On any given day, you have the ability to reduce your personal water use by many gallons of water, perhaps hundreds of gallons if you are very careful and cognizant of your use. Let's look at some ways you can reduce your consumption and use of water. First, when you get up in the morning, do you keep the water running while you brush your teeth? If you brush for the recommended 4 minutes, you are using 4 gallons of water.
After you brush your teeth, do you use the bathroom? It's good to remember this old saying, "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down." It might seem a little crude, but it's a good rule of thumb. Of course, you don't want to let urine sit for a long period of time in the toilet, but if you flush every third time you urinate, you could save several gallons of water each day or more.
To that end, if you don't have low-flow toilets, consider installing them. Older toilets use an average of 3 gallons of water per flush, while newer toilets use about a gallon. That's a considerable savings over the course of a day, or a week or a year. If you can't replace your toilet or toilets, but they are older, consider using a "displacement device" to help save water each time you flush. A displacement device is nothing more than something that "fools" the toilet into thinking it requires less water than it really does to "flush" through it. You can save about a gallon of water with each flush using a displacement device. When you wash your hands after using the toilet, turn the water off while you lather your hands. Better yet, switch to hand sanitizers at least some of the time.
Most everyone knows that taking a shower saves much more water than taking a bath, but do you know how much? The average bath requires 40 gallons of water. A 5-minute shower, on the other hand, can be had for as little as 20 gallons of water. Have you ever heard of a "power shower"? This type of shower is hard to succumb to in the winter but you shut the water off while you soap up and shampoo your hair. Turn the water back on to rinse. This saves another 10 gallons of water, cutting your 5-minute shower down to a total use of 10 gallons. By the far the bathroom is the easiest place in which you can save water. You can choose to not flush the toilet, or to turn the water off when you brush. You can take shorter showers and choose showers over baths. And while we waste a lot of water in the bathroom, there are two other rooms in which we waste even more: the kitchen and the laundry room. Do you have a dishwasher older than 5 years? If so, it's using up to 13 gallons of water per cycle. If you clean a load a day in the dishwasher, that's 91 gallons of water a week, or 4,732 gallons a year! Switch to a water efficient dishwasher and you can reduce that usage to about 4 gallons per cycle, saving as much as 3,200 gallons of water a year. When you do use the dishwasher, only run it if the load is full. Better yet, consider not using the dishwasher. They can send pollutants into our streams and rivers, and use expensive and potentially damaging electricity. If you wash your dishes with a dishpan and by hand, you can save many gallons of water, some electricity and you'll never have to empty the dishwasher! When you begin to think about how much water you use in a day, it really gets to be a study in inadvertent consumption, doesn't it? What about your kitchen faucet? Do you always turn the water off while you are peeling potatoes or carrots, or do you turn the water off and only run it when you need to rinse the potato or carrot? Even better, many water watchers suggest using a bowl to clean your vegetables, just swishing them around nicely to get them clean. (Best yet, buy organic and forget worrying about pesticides on your produce. The bowl swishing, then, will seem especially appropriate.) If you have a garbage disposal, consider not using it. They use a great deal of water and you could instead add your fruit and vegetable peels to your compost pile (which we'll discuss in the section on gardens).
Although you might not give much attention to your water use in the laundry room, you should, because in the laundry room, a lot of water goes down the drain. But you have to have clean clothes, so what choice do you have, right? There are a few choices you have when you walk into your laundry room. First, only run full loads. Make sure your washing machine is as full as it can possibly be. Not only do you waste water if you run a less than full load, but you also waste that precious water.
If you don't have a full load to wash, but need a particular item clean quickly, wash it by hand in a basin of water. Add a small amount of detergent and use some elbow grease to get it clean. Rinse with a small amount of water. Finally, if you are in the market for a new washing machine, purchase an energy-efficient front-loading washer. These use less electricity, of course, but also a good deal less water. Top-loading washing machines can use as much as 40 gallons of water per load, but a front-loading machine might use only 16 gallons (most range between 16 and 24 gallons of water per load). | |||||||
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