Water Conservation?

Being a teenager, I tend to take long showers. The only bad part about these nice, long, and relaxing showers was that, about halfway through I would hear my mom yelling up the stairs, "Turn it off! You're wasting water!" It was pretty annoying because I just didn't understand what she meant by 'wasting water,' or how it even mattered. It was just a couple....or twenty extra minutes, I couldn't be wasting that much water, could I?

Well, last year I had to do a project at school. I was in student council, and that week we were trying to make our school, 'Go green!' by educating our classmates with 'fun facts' about recycling, littering, water conservation, alternative energy sources and air pollution. Everyone was assigned a topic on which you had to research and then have a poster ready for the next day. Ironically, I got assigned water conservation as my topic of research. That night I went home and read up about water conservation-and was astonished to find that my mom had been right. I found an exorbitant amount of information about the various impacts of spending just one extra minute in the shower.

Apparently the average American household is fueled by nearly 2,000 gallons of water a day-almost twice the global average. The amount of water coming out of one shower head inside a normal home is 11.6 gallons, now multiply this with the amount of shower heads in your house and you'll get your total amount of water spent. However, in a water conserving house only 8.6 gallons are used from one shower head, resulting in less water consumption. Five minute showers use up 10 gallons of water...which means that my 25 minute shower wastes 50 gallons of water!

After reading all this information, every time I got into the shower and actually spent my normal 25 minutes in it, I felt guilty. Gradually, the time I spent went down by itself, and amazingly, my mom stopped yelling at me too. Not only was I conserving water by the end, but I didn't get yelled at either. It was a win-win situation for everyone.