In class this week, we had a long discussion about daily water usage. My profs, both being hydrologists, had quite a bit to say about the topic, and brought many interesting facts and questions to the table.

The main one being, how much water do you use per day? This website is a great way of seeing how much water your household uses. It is customizable by area and all the appliances that are used in the house, as well as their specific frequency/intensity of use. It also give great insight about which places your household can save water.

I was astonished to find out that one toilet flush uses between 5 and 20 L of water. It made me seriously consider trying to save some flushes here and there. Next, showering can take anywhere between 20 and 80 L, how crazy is that! This fact got me thinking about something I saw on Facebook the other week: The Smart Showerhead. It monitors how many liters of water you use in the shower and it notifies you with different colored lights. For instance, it turns green once you have used 10L, then purple after you’ve used 50L. It even connects to your smartphone, to keep track of all the water you use in all your showers.

Dishwashers only use about 4L per day (per person) whereas cooking and hand-washing dishes uses 25L per day per person. All that and other daily water uses, comes out to an average of 162L per day per person, and this is only direct water use. This means that all the water that went into growing, transporting and processing all the plants and animals that compose your daily diet is not included. Once this is included, daily water usage shoots up to 2000L per day.

       To add to this, the clothes you wear and leisure items that you use also use water. For instance, a pair of jeans takes 8000L of water to produce, 1L of beer takes 7L of water and 1 kg of paper takes 320L of water. There is literally water going into just about everything, which makes a lot of sense considering it is basically the universal solvent and the only substance found in liquid form on Earth other than Mercury. It is also the major constituent of living things and is composed of the most common element in the universe (hydrogen). It makes a ton of sense why this stuff is in everything. Which leads us to the question of how much of this should we concern ourselves with?

            To start off, if we are going to use things like clothing, computers and books were going to have use some water. The question here is how much is too much? I’ve looked around and there seems to be no clear indication of what is an “OK” amount to use, but the main idea in the literature is that whatever we are using, it needs to be reduced.

How do we reduce our water consumption? Of course it is impossible and unrealistic to consume no water other than drinking water, this is not the point I am trying to make. I’m getting more at the low-impact lifestyle. How to live a desirable life while making the lowest environmental impact possible. To start off, from this list,

eating meat appear to be the worst thing you can do when it comes to wasting water. Secondly, buying used clothes (or used-anything) will also lower your water footprint, as it eliminates some demand for new products, thus saving some water in manufacturing there. Thirdly, take shorter showers. No one really needs more than 5 minutes in there. As I mentioned last week, we must be willing to trade some element of convenience for the sake of leading more sustainable lifestyles. Lastly, have a beer and not a book (I hope you caught my sarcasm)!