An issue that directly connects to sustainability is water waste. The way I aim to measure water waste in daily life is through how long it takes my friends to shower. Showering is one of the easiest ways to waste large quantities of water because of the constantly flowing stream of water. I asked many of my friends how long on average that they shower for in order to evaluate how much water they waste. Based on their answers and the data I gathered, my friends spend on average 21.8 minutes in the shower. The shortest time recorded is 5 minutes and the longest time is on average 45 minutes. The average flow rate of a shower head is 2.1 gallons per minute. This indicates that on average my friends waste 45.78 gallons of water per shower. My friends that take showers on the longer side, 30-45 mins can take shorter showers to reduce their personal water waste and become more sustainable. Every minute makes a difference and adds up over time.
This reminds me of that problem we did in oder to calculate average gallons used by household with showering. I think this is a really useful way to monitor one’s habits and a way to gauge how sustainably one is living.
It is really interesting how big the range is for shower time. That is crazy that Melanie and Sophia could be using 100 gallons of water just for a shower. THis is kind of depressing.
This is a cool way to show your friends their water use. It really put it in perspective.