Don’t Waste Water – We All Need It
Water is something we often take for granted. For most of us in the United States, we are almost always within walking distance of clean water we could either drink, bathe in, clean dishes, and much more.
But water isn’t an endless resource. People living in other countries around the world may have to walk miles to reach the nearest water source, and they can only carry a few gallons home, which they carefully, sparingly use to drink and cook with – and this may not even be clean, healthy water. You may have heard about the extreme case of “Day Zero” in Cape Town, South Africa, where severe droughts threatened to run the country’s second-largest city completely dry. Even in the U.S., especially in our dryer states, we occasionally experience long droughts when we need to cautious about our water consumption.
Fortunately, it can be really easy to conserve water! There’s a website called “Water Use It Wisely” with 100+ simple tips you can follow to save hundreds of gallons of water every month. You can follow these tips to save water throughout your home, at work, out in your yard, or just when you’re out and about in regular, daily life.
Here are some quick tips out of the 100+:
Put a five-minute timer on your showers – you can save 1,000 gallons of water per month.
Cut back on baths – you can use about 70 gallons of water per bath. If you just need to take a bath for whatever reason, don’t drain the cold water, just wait for the scalding water to balance out the cold. Or just take a shower. You could have taken a shower in the time it took to read this tip.
While waiting for your water to heat up, fill up a bucket with the colder water for your indoor and outdoor plants, to use to rinse fruits and vegetables, or soak your sticky pots or pans.
Don’t trim your lawn too low – about two inches is a good height to shade grass roots and hold in moisture. Keeping the cut grass on the lawn will also help hold in moisture and keep your lawn healthy.
When you wash your car, park in the lawn to water your grass at the same time. If you’re more of a car wash person, make sure the car wash you go to recycles their water.
Get a rain barrel to collect water from your gutters, which you can then use to water plants around your home during a drier period.
When buying plants, choose native ones. They require less water than a non-native tropical plant would. If some plants need more water than others, group those needier plants together to avoid overwatering the others.
These are just a few of many tips you can find on Water – Use It Wisely. You can also help yourself save water by auditing your water use and you can follow their monthly planner to keep up with all their tips throughout the year.
We hope these tips give you some great ideas how to start conserving hundreds of gallons of water, and more importantly, get excited about helping out the environment!