life in general: (part 2) ecology conservation steps

Earlier this month (1 June), I started a series of posts in which I will put up tips and suggestions for those who are sensitive towards the protection of our planet's environment and ecology. All of them will be based on my own implementation of my sensitivity that began 3-4 years ago. My first post of 1 June talked about reducing the use of cooking gas.

This is the second part and I am going to briefly touch upon an issue of the enormous wastage of water happening all around our planet by our mindless use of water. In this water post, I only touch upon our use of water from taps, showers etc in our daily lives. There are other uses of water that I am not going into in this post (one of them relates to rainwater harvesting on which i had written a long piece in 2004). The wastage is in our keeping the taps or the showers running at a high speed that is way beyond necessary. The high speed flow of water means much a lot of water goes into the drains (see an example of such wastage in the photo to the right... i picked it up on the internet from here). When we are washing our hands or our bodies we need not have a lot of water flowing to be able to clean our hands or bodies. We can make do with half the speed of the water flow (see an example of this in the photo below to the left.... i picked it up on theinter net from here).

Homes and hotels are the two places where the wastage of water in fast-flowing water taps is the most. Even hotels that incorporate timed water taps do not help because the time given to the water flow before it stops is very high. So if one wants to just use 2-3 seconds of slow flowing water the automated water taps will still throw out 5-10 seconds of fast-flowing water.

The other thing is the time factor -- how long do we keep our taps and showers running. We can immediately stop keeping taps on when brushing our teeth or shaving (for men). We can immediately stop keeping the shower on when we are applying soap on our bodies or shampoo on our hair (i have a lot to say about cutting by 50-90% of our use of soaps and shampoos, but that will follow in a later post). We can do even better. I have seen men keeping the water taps on while combing their hair or applying a few drops of water to wet their hair. This can be curbed with immediate effect.

I think we all can easily avoid excessive and longer run of water from taps and showers. Our water footprint can easily be reduced by 20-30 per cent by doing this.