Do We Have to Be Green to Save Water?

Posted on July 5th, 2009

Going Green has become a very popular topic the last few years. If you search the word Green on Google it will come up with 862 million results and growing. The Green Building topic has become just as prevalent with even more interest. If you search Green Building on Google it will come up with 870 million results. But whether you plan on building a new home or remodel, green will come up in some form.

The whole green focus was established to help conserve our natural resources, by reducing the use or waste of any natural resource. One natural resource that the whole world needs to help reducing, even if going green is not a consideration, is our water supply. Urban water usage is expected to grow by nearly 40% by the year 2020 increasing the need to help reduce what water is wasted. There are a lot of ways to help save water from just adding low flow fixtures to reusing gray water. Some may be extreme for some households, so I want to touch on ways anyone can save water.

First we need to see where our water is going. Here is a short list of the averages from DrinkTap.org

Water Use Statistics

Daily indoor per capita water use in the typical single family home is 69.3 gallons. Here is how it breaks down:

Use	Gallons per Capita	Percentage of Total Daily Use
Showers	11.6	16.8%
Clothes Washers	15.0	21.7%
Dishwashers	1.0	1.4%
Toilets	18.5	26.7%
Baths	1.2	1.7%
Leaks	9.5	13.7%
Faucets	10.9	15.7%
Other Domestic Uses	1.6	2.2%

By installing more efficient water fixtures and regularly checking for leaks, households can reduce daily per capita water use by about 35% to about 45.2 gallons per day. These are very basic changes whether you are planning on going green or not.

Here’s how it breaks down for households using conservation measures:

Use	Gallons per Capita	Percentage of Total Daily Use
Showers	8.8	19.5%
Clothes Washers	10.0	22.1%
Toilets	8.2	18.0%
Dishwashers	0.7	1.5%
Baths	1.2	2.7%
Leaks	4.0	8.8%
Faucets	10.8	23.9%
Other Domestic Uses	1.6	3.4%
Source: Handbook of Water Use and Conservation, Amy Vickers

If all U.S. households installed water-saving features, water use would decrease by 30 percent, saving an estimated 5.4 billion gallons per day. This would result in dollar-volume savings of $11.3 million per day or more than $4 billion per year.

If you review the chart you will see that toilets, showers and clothes washers are the biggest savings. Now do you really need to do a complete remodel to make these changes? NO. Changing out shower heads is a very simple project. The front loading washers are also very easy except the cost. Toilets are also not hard to change out, but some may want to hire a plumber to do this.

We can all take part in saving water and it does not have to be a huge undertaking.