Wednesday, May 28, 2008

One Little Drip of Water

As Krystle has written about before, clean, drinkable water is a major issue across the world. According to GlobalIssues.org, water problems affect half of humanity, and some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.

Here in the good ole US of A, we use a lot of water. I'm guilty of it. In fact, according to the same source, the average person in the US uses 600 liters of water a day. To put that in perspective, the 1.8 billion people who have access to a water source within 1 kilometer, but not in their house or yard, consume around 20 liters per day. 20 liters compared to 600 liters. Wow.

So. How can I reduce the amount of water I waste? The obvious answer is to eliminate the drip drip drip in my shower that I can hear from my bedroom, no matter how hard I try to turn off the water. Just how much water could come out of the slow drip? Well... I was surprised after the 24 hour test I performed:



That's a lot of water, every day, all the time, coming out of my tap. I can fix it, probably by just replacing a washer or two.. at least according to this water information website (scroll down to the section on dripping). Hopefully by making small changes, we can avoid having to resort to recycling sewage into clean water like some California cities...

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Related posts: Water, Water Everywhere

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