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Monday, March 16, 2015

Your shower is wasting huge amounts of energy and water. Here’s what you can do about it.

For a standard shower head, every minute wasted equates to 2.5 gallons of water — and insofar as some of it is warm, “that’s energy-rich water that we’re running down the drain.” And research conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has suggested that the waste levels may be even higher — 30 percent of shower water overall and 41 percent of “hot water energy.” Showering drives almost 17 percent of water use in homes, and an average American family uses some 40 gallons of water per day in the shower. 
This amounts to 1.2 trillion gallons of water in the United States each year, says EPA, “enough to supply the water needs of New York and New Jersey” over the same time period. If 20 percent of that is wasted, well, you’re talking about over 200 billion gallons, in a world where gigantic states (California) and megacities (Sao Paulo, Brazil) are suffering from drought and water scarcity problems are expected to become still worse in the decades ahead. Read more at http://www.washingtonpost.com