With the week approaching and the rainy weather being expected early and through next week here in Austin, it gave me the idea to talk about water. Here are some staggering statistics on water waste. While seeing it with my own eyes and being guilty to wasting water unnecessarily in my lifetime, it led me to research the fine facts of what us humans are doing. Here are 10 facts I found on an article released a few years ago on chelseagreen.com;

  1. Americans now use 127 percent more water than we did in 1950.
  2. About 95 percent of the water entering our homes goes down the drain.
  3. Running the tap while brushing your teeth can waste 4 gallons of water.
  4. Older toilets can use 3 gallons of clean water with every flush, while new toilets use as little as 1 gallon.
  5. Leaky faucets that drip at the rate of one drop per second can waste up to 2,700 gallons of water each year.
  6. A garden hose or sprinkler can use almost as much water in an hour as an average family of four uses in one day.
  7. A water-efficient dishwasher will use as little as 4 gallons per wash cycle, whereas some older models use up to 13 gallons per cycle.
  8. Some experts estimate that more than 50 percent of landscape water use goes to waste due to evaporation or runoff caused by over-watering.
  9. Many people in the world exist on 3 gallons of water per day or less. We can use that amount in one flush of the toilet.
  10. Over a quarter of all the clean, drinkable water you use in your home is used to flush the toilets.

Certain places around the world suffer massively from the lack of water, here in the United States places like California of recent times has been at the forefront of the topic, as they do indeed suffer from drought, just like many places here in Texas. A friend of mine actually visited to California, in specific Santa Clara. He was rooming with some locals and one day took a 20 minute shower, the people he was living with were mortified about how long he took in there. While it may seem like a overreaction to my friend Eddie, this is the kind of action that needs to happen to raise awareness.

It is only if we talk about what we hear and spread the word to try and combat this issue will help resolve it. A lot of people are not educated in this field, including myself up until recent times. So by sharing the knowledge about issues such as water waste will benefit many more people around the globe.

So having highlighted just how much water waste across United across should hopefully inspire you to take some sort of action. Whether it is making sure you turn off all the taps in your apartments/houses or by investing in modern day technology which saves more energy/water it all helps!

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