An's Personal Impact Project

I choose to take shorter showers because I often take really long shower that can last for 20 minutes. My shower is that long because I like to be in the water and it just really warm in the shower. Unlike me, my family take really short shower because they have a lots of things to do. I’m the only with that problem. “The average American shower uses 17.2 gallons (65.1 liters) and lasts for 8.2 minutes at average flow rate of 2.1 gallons per minute” (Homewaterworks). This is a lot less compare to the amount of water I use. If 2.1 gallons are pour out per minutes and I shower for 20 minutes, then the amount of water I use per shower is 42 gallons. And there are 365 days (I shower everyday) in a year which is a total of 15,330 gallons gallons of water I used in a year (basically 16x32 pool with a 4 ft depth) . This is a lot! I need to lower this number! To do this, I will cut my showering time by half and limited to the number of time I shower I shower in a week. What that mean is I will now shower for 10 minutes and only shower on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Doing this will hopefully cut down the number of water I use by more than half.

Water is a very valuable resource that we have. In the world, “only 0.007% is available for drinking, and we use a lot of that precious 0.007% in our showers.” (DoNation)) So to save more fresh/drinking water, I’m willing to cut my shower and the number of time I shower down to sustain the amount of water usage. Not only this, freshwater is also very expensive to produce using high energy/expensive equipments. Those equipments are used to do reverse osmosis, “desalination uses the principle of osmosis to remove salt and other impurities, by transferring water through a series of semi-permeable membranes.” (IDE Technologies) into freshwater. “Current methods require about 14 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater” (Schirber, 2007) and “the entire country consumes about 323 billion gallons per day of surface water and another 84.5 billion gallons of groundwater” (Schirber, 2007 and if “half of this water came from desalination, the United States would need more than 100 extra electric power plants, each with a gigawatt of capacity” (Schirber, 2007). This is a lot of energy use to produce freshwater. Once we reach to the point where to have to rely to reverse osmosis to give us fresh water, the problem will no longer be only about water but rather energy (electricity) use and how we will produce sustainable energy. This is why we should use less water or use it more efficiently.

What I will be doing:

• I will shower every other day. (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday)
• I will shower for a maximum of 10 minutes ( I will set it for 9 minutes and use the last 1 minutes to stop)
• Stop the water every-time I put on soap

Some people might ask why am I not doing water use for washing dishes instead. And my answer is because showering less will much save much more water than cutting down the amount of water used for washing dishes. “Getting them (dishes) clean in the sink can use up to 27 gallons of water per load. An Energy Star certified dishwasher can use as little as 3 gallons per load (around 11 liters), according to the Natural Resources Defense Council and Cnet. “In fact, an Energy Star certified dishwasher can save almost 5,000 gallons of water per year.” (Bradford, 2017) My family is a traditional Asian family that trust our hand more than the machines. So what that mean is we always wash our dishes with our own hand. By doing this, we are potentially using 27 per load (per day) and there 365 days in year. 27 gallons * 365 days = 9855 gallons of water used in a year. This number is way less 15330 gallons of water used for showering. Because of the huge amount of water I’m about to save by cutting down my showering time, I chose to do shorter shower instead of cutting down water usage for dish washing.