Shrinking your footprint
Taking shorter showers, watering lawn less can help reduce water use
Doron Amiran, development director for the Conservation Strategy Fund, recommends using mulch and low-water plants, limiting lawn space and watering by hand or dip system to lower water-use footprint.
CHRISTOPHER CHUNG/ PDPublished: Friday, August 27, 2010 at 1:31 p.m.
Last Modified: Friday, August 27, 2010 at 1:31 p.m.
As a self-proclaimed environmentalist, Petaluma resident Michelle Hughes-Markovics strives to conserve water at every turn.
She takes brief showers. She washes dirty dishes in a tub of water. She and her husband even let the grass die in the yard of their rental so they wouldn't have to water it regularly.
Still, when the pair recently ran their water usage habits through WeCalc (www.wecalc.org), a free, Web-based water/energy/climate calculator, they were shocked to find out how much water they really use — roughly 48 gallons apiece each day.
The number itself, however, helped put things into perspective.
“When you're taking a shower, you don't think of things in terms of gallons,” said Hughes-Markovics, an anthropology professor at Santa Rosa Junior College. “Having this hard data in front of you really serves as a wake-up call that even the most diligent among us can be doing more.”
Hughes-Markovics and her husband used the calculator to determine their water footprint, their actual water use as well as the greenhouse gases emitted in producing the energy they consume.
Domestic use like theirs — showers, sinks and such — comprises only one percent of the nation's total consumption. Electric energy production gobbles 48 percent of the rest. Irrigating crops of all kinds sucks up 34 percent, and other public uses account for 11 percent.
As with our carbon footprint, experts have begun to measure water footprints as a measure of our individual impacts on the system as a whole.
Caitlin Cornwall, development officer and biologist at the Sonoma Ecology Center in Sonoma, says that indirect water usage — water we “use” through the choices we make as consumers — can be formidable as well. “In many cases, we're overusing water without even knowing it,” Cornwall said.
One cup of coffee, for instance, requires 37 gallons of water to produce from bean to brew, at least according to the Water Footprint Network, a Holland-based nonprofit. The same group says that one liter of milk requires 264 gallons of water from udder to carton, and one kilogram of rice needs nearly 793 gallons of water from grain to bag.
On a global scale, it can be challenging to get people to think about the water ramifications of the decisions they make as consumers. Locally, raising awareness can be tough, too.
One year removed from a water shortage in Sonoma County, the process of understanding what comprises a water footprint can be a harrowing exercise. But experts say that evaluating how much water consumers are using can be invaluable in strategizing a plan to conserve.
“It's certainly an eye-opener,” said Carrie Pollard, water conservation specialist with the Sonoma County Water Agency.
Most family-level footprint exercises start with a simple glance at the water bill.
Almost all local water agencies spell out monthly meter stats for customers so they can get a sense of overall use (look for the part of the bill that indicates “units consumed”).
Beyond that, customers can take billing information to a calculator such as WeCalc and, after answering a battery of additional questions, get a more detailed sense of daily, weekly and monthly consumption.
In Petaluma, Hughes-Markovics and her husband learned through this process that they each use 44 gallons of water per day indoors — 36 percent less than the national average. The data also indicated that only 4.2 gallons of the household total was for outdoor use — 98 percent less than the national average.
To put this latter number into context, Heather Cooley, co-director of the water program at the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, the organization that developed WeCalc, noted that lawns and irrigation systems account for more than 70 percent of household use in many communities.
“Overwatered lawns are a big drain,” she said. With this in mind, cutting down on outdoor water use is a huge step toward reducing a family's water footprint.
Other strategies include installing faucet aerators and WaterSense showerheads, switching to water-efficient washing machines and using low-flow toilets that take only 1.6 gallons per flush. Another suggestion, as simple as it seems, is taking shorter showers.
“Many people are turned off by the initial investment in some of these strategies, but you've got to look at the long-term,” said Doron Amiran, development director for the Conservation Strategy Fund, a Sebastopol nonprofit that focuses on economic solutions to environmental issues. “Low-flow toilets aren't cheap, but they'll pay for themselves in savings quickly.”
It's also important to note that a water footprint isn't exclusively about water.
Dan Muelrath, water conservation program coordinator for the City of Santa Rosa, noted that many foods — beef, for instance — require a lot of water in production and can negatively affect a consumer's overall water footprint, both directly and indirectly.
Cooley added that a consumer's water use is closely tied to consumption of other resources, directly linking the water footprint to larger environmental issues such as greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
“More water requires more energy — energy to bring water to your community, to treat the water so it's safe to drink and to deliver it to your home,” she explained. “If you use less water, you use less energy, which is a double savings in resources and a win-win for everyone, including the Earth.”
Shrinking one's water footprint doesn't have to be costly.
Muelrath said the Santa Rosa utility mails out home audit kits for customers to determine how much water they're using with each shower, and distributes free faucet aerators and low-flow shower heads to all customers who ask.
He added that just about every municipal agency offers information about water-efficient appliances to help consumers make solid choices down the road.
“There are no big secrets when it comes to water conservation,” he said. “Resources are scarce, and everyone in the business is striving to protect the environment for as long as we possibly can.”
Matt Villano is a freelance writer based in Healdsburg. You can reach him at mjv@whalehead.com.
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