Friday, March 06, 2009

Going Green #6.



I read an article that says the next ten items are the easiest things to do – to be more environmentally conscious. Interesting … I wonder how much these ten can actually help?

10 easy ways to go green
1. Change a light bulb to a CFL or LED
2. Use one less napkin (average uses 2,200 per year)
3. Turn off your computer
4. Use a laptop
5. Use both sides of the paper
6. Ditch one-use water bottles
7. Stop brushing while running water
8. Turn off the lights
9. Set your cruise control
10. Inflate your tires

What about the age-old question of the double space after a period? Is that wasteful? What about just using a single space between periods?

I read an article that was about wasting water and it asked you to answer these questions. Put the number of times you use/do each of these per day per person in your household:
Bath (25 gallons)
Brushing Teeth (5 gallons)
Flushing Toilet (5 gallons)
Laundry (40 gallons)
Shower (5 minutes) (50 gallons)
Washing Dishes (20 gallons)
Washing Hands (5 gallons)

Keep in mind that the above are just averages for the number of gallons that these activities use. I added up my household and we use 340 gallons (on average) a day. That would be 2380 gallons a week. This of course does not include other things (drinking water, washing cars, watering plants …)

What do you guys come up with your daily or weekly totals?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If your shower is using 10 gallons per minute then the quickest fix that you could do would be to buy a decent low flow shower head.

We have one from Delta that uses 1.7 gallons per minute. It has saved a ton of water and cost all of $25. All of your water estimates seem like they are over by a factor of two except for taking a bath. For example our dish washer does a full load in 7 gallons, our toilet flushes in 2.3 gallons, our washing machine (front loading) uses 19 gallons, and brushing my teeth just takes a cup of water.

It would be interesting for you to check your water bill and see how close your daily estimate is.

alex

onthemove - klh said...

on watering the plants. I used to leave a bucket in the shower until it got to temp and I got in...plenty of water for what few plants survive my tender minstrations