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The Green Blue Book: The Simple Water-Savings Guide to Everything in Your Life - Softcover

Kostigen, Thomas M.

 
9781605294711: The Green Blue Book: The Simple Water-Savings Guide to Everything in Your Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1605294713 ISBN 13: 9781605294711
Verlag: Rodale Pr, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

With hundreds of entertaining facts, Thomas Kostigen gives simple tips for water saving, both the water you see and use and "virtual water," the water you cannot see but is embedded in the things you consume. For example, it takes 27 gallons of water to grow a banana but only 19 gallons of water to grow an apple—thus choosing to eat an apple can save 8 gallons of water. The Green Blue Book includes an extensive guide so you can make smarter choices and help reduce the demand for water-intensive foods and products. With breakthrough research, humor, and a hopeful message, The Green Blue Book will show how, drop by drop, one's water savings can add up.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

THOMAS M. KOSTIGEN is author of You Are Here and coauthor of The Green Book. He writes the popular Ethics Monitor column for Dow Jones MarketWatch and hosts a weekly broadcast for the Wall Street Journal Digital network.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

home

home is where the water is

I used to daydream in the shower, letting my mind fog over like the bathroom mirror fogged with steam. Then I became aware of how much water I was wasting with every extra minute I stood there. Now it's as if I shower at the Bates Motel: I'm in and out quickly.

Many of us mindlessly waste water, either because we are just fogging out or because we really don't know any better. A home-based education on water is what we need. And here's why: Our homes are where we use the most water in our lives. The average household in America uses about 400 gallons of water per day. That can easily be cut to less than 100 gallons by doing a few simple things.

But first I'd like to explain what the average home looks like. Sixty- thousand-square-foot mansions like Bill Gates's home (which is rumored to use about 5 million gallons of water a year, more than 30 times the average home's use, by the way) aren't what I'm describing. Rather, the average size of a new home in the United States is more than 2,500 square feet--780 square feet larger than the typical home built 3 decades ago. Picture a ranch-style home, which is uniquely American. It has 3 bedrooms, 21/2 bathrooms, a laundry room, and a 300-square-foot kitchen. The direct sources of water inside this house include fixtures, pipes, tubing, and toilets. From these taps all sorts of routine activities spawn. We brush our teeth, shave, wash dishes, shower, take baths, do laundry, bathe babies. But how much thought do we put into the means of our doings compared to how much we think about the action itself? We are careful not to cut ourselves shaving, but we usually aren't so careful about not leaving the tap running.

Our homes provide us with sustenance, yet we take much of this for granted. Water, especially, is expected. Until the mid- 1800s, water wasn't commonly available via indoor plumbing. People pumped it from underground wells or lived by rivers. It wasn't until the 1930s that the federal government started declaring a home substandard if it didn't have indoor plumbing.

The Romans may have built an amazing municipal water and sewer system as far back as 800 BC, but it took centuries for people to get used to flushing, washing, and drinking in the privacy of their own homes. This was mostly due to cost. The cost for a private home to install indoor plumbing in the late 19th century was more than $500--an enormous sum at that time. Back then the average home was less than half the size it is today.

Size, you might say, doesn't matter when it comes to water use. After all, an additional bedroom doesn't necessarily equate to more water consumption. But more bathrooms do. So do bigger kitchens. We've learned to pipe in more to feed our water frenzy in the name of convenience. Not that there is anything wrong with convenience. It's a marvel to turn on a faucet and have your choice of hot or cold water. Imagine just how awestruck a caveman would be by this magic.

Consciousness shouldn't have to take a backseat to luxury, however. We can lessen the profligate drain on our water supplies without sacrificing much, if anything. The average person needs about 13 gallons of water a day to drink, wash, and eat. We in America use almost 10 times that. In fact, the global population may have tripled in the 20th century, but water consumption went up sevenfold.

Using less doesn't mean we have to go backward in time, or do without anything. It means using water more wisely. And here's how.

IN THE BATHROOM . . .

Turn off the tap when you brush your teeth. Do as your dentist recommends and brush your teeth three times a day, and, tap running, you'll likely use about 5 gallons of water. Turn off the tap, and you could use as little as a few tablespoons. If every American did this, the savings after just 1 day would be as much as all the residents of an average-size state use in 21/2 days.

Install a low-flow or dual flush toilet. These types use less water per flush, and dual flush models give you the choice of flushing with more water or less depending on the, um, "action." If you can't install a new toilet, put a half-gallon jug of water in your tank--make sure it doesn't float--to reduce its volume. Toilets account for about 27 percent of the water we consume indoors. As a nation, we flush almost 11 billion gallons per day. Place a half-gallon jug in your tank, and your household of four could save about 4,400 gallons per year. Low-flows and dual flushes cut use in half--up to 3 gallons per flush--compared to older toilets.

Take a shorter shower. The average person showers for 8 minutes a day. Every minute uses about 21/2 gallons of water. So that's 20 gallons of water for the average shower. If everyone turned off the water 1 minute sooner, the savings across the country would total nearly 12 billion gallons.

Screw on a low-flow showerhead. These and low-flow faucet aerators (see page 9) can reduce your water consumption by 50 percent. That means your teenager can still spend twice as much time in the shower--but only use half the amount of water.

Skip baths. Filling the tub can use three times as much water as taking an average-length shower. This savings alone amounts to 12,000 gallons a year. That's about as much water as it takes to fill an average above-ground swimming pool.

Fill the sink instead of letting the water run when you shave. You'll save 90 gallons of water a month. We could fill a football stadium 1,370 times with the water saved if every US adult male did this.

IN THE KITCHEN . . .

Measure your coffee-making water more accurately, and the 1 extra cup you leave behind at the bottom of the coffeepot won't go to waste. The biggest single use of drinking water is for making coffee. The 48 percent of US adults, or 106 million people, who drink it every day can make sure it's good to the last drop. Savings: 2.4 billion gallons per year.

Don't always believe the box when you cook. It only takes 11/2 quarts of water, for instance, to cook a £d of pasta,whereas most instructions say it takes between 4 and 6 quarts. Considering that we cook a billion £ds of pasta per year in the United States, the water savings could equal a billion gallons as well.

You don't have to drink that much water to be hydrated. It's a myth that you need eight 8-ounce glasses of water every day to stay healthy. Four 8- ounce glasses will do for the average healthy human being. And even that is generous: We get most of the water we need to survive from the food we eat. Cut the myth in half, and we'd save more than 300 million liters of water a day, which is almost as much as all the bottled water sold every day throughout the world.

Only freeze ice cubes you'll use within a month, especially if you have a frost-free freezer. The water "in" ice cubes evaporates after several weeks because of sublimation, when H2O goes from its solid state to a gas. Your freezer fan and opening and closing the freezer door speed up this process. It takes about 11/2 cups of water to fill a tray. Evaporate a tray from every household in America, and we lose some 10 million gallons into thin air.

Compost instead of running water to clear your disposal. Five gallons of water per minute are being wasted as your food goes down the drain. Compost by turning your food waste into fertilizer and at the same time save almost 2,000 gallons of water per year.

Soak your vegetables instead of rinsing them with the tap on. You'll need only about a cup of water for a £d of vegetables versus the 80 cups you'd use by letting the tap run.

Have designated drinking glasses for family members that they can use throughout the day--or across multiple days--instead of having them take a new glass each time they get thirsty. This will cut down on the...

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Verlag
Rodale Pr
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1605294713
ISBN 13 
9781605294711
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
210
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Verantwortliche Person
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