I'm sure most of us take water for granted. Just turn on the tap and water flows.
We use it for washing, drinking, washing, washing.... Mainly washing.
So I was thinking, how much water do we really use?
The answer seems very simple. 5.4 cubic meters. That's the number on my utilities bill.
But what is 5.4 cbm?
Ok, that's 5400 liters of water, or 10800, 500ml bottles.
500ml is the PET bottle that we usually drink from.
Divide by 30 means the number will be 180 liters per day!!!
If we drink 10 liters of water a day at home, this leaves 170 liters for other activities!!!
If we look at olden days and we had to carry water from the well using pails, we would need around 18 pails of water for 1 days use. Imagine having to transport 180 kg worth of water everyday! I think most people would, instead, use less water and transport less water daily.
Now we just turn on the tap.
So how do we "spend" this 180 liters per day?
Let's use some estimates, cos I'm not entirely sure anyway.
10 liters for drinking.
Around 4-5 liters per flush of the toilet. I stay at home a lot, so let's say combined, we flush 10 times? That's 40-50 liters.
We do washing once in 2 days. Some websites indicate efficient washing machines use 50-100 liters per load. So I'll just throw a number and say I use 60 liters per 2 days, meaning I use 30 liters per day.
A 10 minute shower is expected to use around 60 liters of water, so that's 120 liters.
At this point I've already exceeded my daily limit, so my estimations are likely inaccurate.
I haven't even included washing dishes and cleaning food items, which happen on a daily basis.
And how much do I pay for this water? Well around $13 per month. Or 43 cents per day.
And let's think about it again...
How much ice mountain/Dasani can we buy with 43 cents?
1 miserable 500ml bottle...
Can you imagine using 120 bottles of ice mountain to take a shower?
Or flushing 8 bottles of ice mountain into the toilet PER press?
I knew I took water for granted... But today, as I'm doing this post, I've never looked at it this way until now. It's quite an amazing revelation to me.
1 carton of ice mountain contains around 12 liters.
12 bottles x 1 liter or 24 x 500ml.
For 1 days usage, I would need 15 cartons. And that's just 1 day.
And all this water that comes from our tap is drinkable. It's not like we use good water for drinking, and we wash clothes with the water from the river. For all our uses, we use good clean water. Even the water we flush our toilets with.
So hopefully, with this post, readers will look at water differently. I'm not trying saying to say save more water or don't flush the toilet.
Consumers pay for this as a service anyway.
But rather to respect the luxury of good clean water at the turn of our tap. That the ice mountain priced so expensive at supermarkets is also the same stuff we use to bathe.
(If you didn't know, ice mountain is filtered tap water. It's not mineral water.)
And that we all use a lot more water on a daily basis than we think we do.
It's just that we don't think about it very much, cos we have grown up having this convenience right at the twist of a tap.
Don't forget that's 180 liters PER DAY!!!
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