Water water everywhere
and not a drop to drink . . .
I just finished the National Geographic issue about water. It had the usual scary receding glacier pictures (there are few things that sicken me more), and a half dozen fascinating maps of the world’s rivers. But the one statement that has stayed with me was the fact that the average American uses 100 gallons of water at home every day. Albuquerque, New Mexico, recently brought their per capita consumption down to 80 gallons, from 140 gallons per day! Where does it go? As I was filling up our drinking water jugs the other night I tried to do the math for us. As a family of four we go through about 58 gallons of freshwater a week, on the boat, for dishes, drinking, washing and cooking. Our toilet/head uses saltwater exclusively. Our tank is pumped weekly by a local pump-out boat to keep it out of the Keys waters. The girls and I shower together at the marina, with a low-flow shower head. Between ourselves and John, we use about 40 gallons a week to keep ourselves clean. We do two loads of laundry a week, which we estimate to be about 80 gallons total. That brings our total family freshwater usage to 178 gallons per week. If you go by National Geographic’s numbers, the average American family of four (like ours), uses 2800 gallons of freshwater per week.
One of the pieces in the magazine profiled a community in Ethiopia where women spend eight hours of their day walking to and from a dirty river to fetch drinking water. They wash their clothes once a year. We are clean, healthy, and well-fed. We drink all the water we want. In fact, we’ve banned juice and other sticky beverages from the boat, so water is just about all our kids drink. John and I supplement with beer. But the numbers seem staggering to me. How is our weekly total just 78 gallons more than the average American uses on a daily basis?
I found a water use calculator for Tampa, Florida and entered some guesstimations for the average family of four- two showers a day, a few baths a week, a lawn to water occasionally (in Florida, for sure!), four loads of laundry per week . . . and sure enough, I hit the 100 gallon per day mark. It must come down to a few things. Our faucets don’t run. They can’t run, as I have a foot pump to feed water to my galley sink. We don’t have a lawn or a garden. If we do in the future, we will most certainly collect rainwater for the plants. The toilet seems to be an enormous consumer. Here in the Keys, we’ve been short on water for so long that public restrooms will often sport the sign, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow . . .” I’m not advocating drastic measures, but for land-based homes, a composting toilet is looking better and better. I’ve seen dishwashers that recycle graywater/rainwater, but they seem to be fairly efficient appliances to begin with. Far better than handwashing. I have made a concerted effort to cut down on our laundry- making sure that the girls clothes are actually dirty. Rosy being out of diapers has helped. And I suppose showering is a state of mind. We don’t shower every day. If we worked in an office or got particularly gross at a job, we certainly would, but years of sailboat living have robbed us of that need. We do spend a lot of time in the pool.
We didn’t move onto the boat to save water. It is a wonderful by-product of our lifestyle, in the same way that energy conservation comes naturally on a boat fueled almost entirely by wind power and solar panels (when we’re off the dock!). But crunching numbers like this makes me truly appreciate how much we were taking for granted. Freshwater truly falling from the sky. Everywhere you look, with every faucet you turn on. And yet it defines entire existences in other parts of the world.
How lucky we are.
