Water is a crucial component to life on earth. In developed countries, it is an extremely common part of many daily activities that we often take for granted. Has your anyone ever told you to shut the faucet off when you brush your teeth? If this type of mindset were applied to every time we use water, we would be able to reduce our overall water consumption easily. Water is something we often take for granted, however with the right daily practices we can learn to appreciate it more.

The US residential average of daily water used per capita is 300 litres. Drinking water travels up to 715 kilometers to Los Angeles from the Oroville Dam. Just the creation of new dams alone is not enough to solve the water shortages occurring in California. The only way we can conserve water is to have a different mindset about it. There needs to be a complete revolution in our consumption patterns of water.

Using the calculator on the App, I consume about 320 litres of water everyday due to normal activities. This does not include things like laundry, washing my car, and other activities that I really don’t do every single day. This is above the US National Average, and with laundry included it adds up to about 400 litres per day.

This challenge, once completed, was not as difficult as I thought it would be. I ended up reducing my water consumption to around 132 litres effortlessly. This is an estimation however I was able to significantly reduce the amount of water I consume without much of a hassle. The only difficult aspect to this project is some things I had little to no control over, like flushing and drinking water. However, I never realized how much water I was really wasting on a day to day basis before completing this challenge. I did not reach the 80 litres based on the calculator, however I did reduce my consumption by about a half.

There were several things that I did to reduce my water consumption that took very little effort. Most of them included simply turning off the faucet when not using water! Activities like brushing teeth, washing hands, and washing your face can be made much more sustainable by just turning the faucet off when you’re not directly using the water.

I tend to like to take really long showers and unfortunately with this challenge I couldn’t do so. I think that to many people a long hot shower is something that we all feel entitled to, however it truly is a luxury. It’s important to find alternatives to relaxing other than a shower that wastes a lot of water.

Cooking in my kitchen was an area that I really didn’t think of in terms of water consumption. I never realized how much water is wasted by cooking, drinking, and washing dishes. This was another area where just turning off the faucet when you’re not using it saves a lot of water. Filling up a pot with water and using that to wash off dishes was a little annoying, but it saved SO much water. I also used a pot filled with water to scrub fruit and vegetables instead of running it under the faucet. Whenever I needed to cook something that required water, I actually measured out how much water I need. (This is probably something I should have been doing in the first place but I’m really so lazy.)

I don’t think it’s very difficult to make small changes to save water. I do think that the majority of water just don’t realize how much water they are wasting in the first place. People mostly think of saving water in terms of showering quickly and turning the faucet off when you brush your teeth, however water can find its way into many of our daily activities without us recognizing it. I think that a lot of water can be saved by switching to more sustainable household appliances (like toilets). It’s also important to inform other people living in your household to make these small changes with you. My mom thought I was crazy for rinsing off dishes in a pot of water but when I told her about how much water I was saving she couldn’t believe it. Simply being mindful of water during your daily activities can make a big difference.