Groxie

After one week on the water diet, I am confused. I attempted last week to account for my average daily residential water use. The average in America is 350 liters/day, and the world average is 150 liters/day. I can’t figure out where I’ve gone wrong, but I came in at 86 liters/day before beginning any major conservaion attempts. That just doesn’t seem correct. On the other hand, I am certain that if I had the means to figure out my additional water use through commerical and agricultural products, I would find my numbers going through the roof.

Typical residential use categories according to the EPA include: drinking and cooking, bathing, toilet flushing, washing clothes and dishes, watering lawns and gardens, maintaining swimming pools, and washing cars. I don’t do either of the last two; since we rent and don’t have our own lawn or garden, I only water a few houseplants. Even then I usually use leftover cooking water or water collected from the shower as it heats up.

Here are the figures I came up with for this week:

• 192 liters for toilet (6 liters per flush)
• 5.6 liters drinking water
• 110 liters shower (9 liters per minute)
• 170.5 liters laundry (30 gallons per load)
• 5 liters for toothbrushing
• 8.0 liters water for cooking
• 107.1 liters for dishwashing
• 4.5 liters for random stuff

That’s 602.7 liters total, for an average of 86.1 liters per day. Even if my measurements don’t match up with the typical statistics, I now have a clear baseline for my own usage.

Tracking my food consumption this last week was hellish. I didn’t eat well, even by normal standards, so I know I have plenty of room for improvement. My biggest downfall was in the beverage department:

• 96 ounces beer (122 liters to process, another 1916 liters to grow the ingredients)
• 82 ounces soda (259 liters to process)
• 36 ounces coffee (630 liters to grow and process the coffee)
• 24 ounces tea (105 liters to process)
• 8 ounces wine (240 liters to grow and process)

That’s 3272 liters just to grow and process my beverages for a week!

Though last week seems to have gone off—track somewhere, I still learned plenty about my water usage. This week I plan on implementing some conservation measures to lower my totals. With my baseline established, I’ll be able to measure the percentage decrease in my consumption this week.

Since we are renting, all of my decreases will have to come from personal changes instead of technological or structural changes. I think I have the most room for improvement in my toilet and dishwashing use. I’m also going to severely decrease the amount of processed beverages I consume, but I can’t promise to give up tea entirely! I’ll check in again next Monday with my results.