Cover Story
High-Tech, Easy Ways to Conserve
Most of us have probably been told to turn off the faucet while brushing our teeth or to take shorter showers to conserve water. But new technologies take water efficiency to unprecedented levels, allowing households to save both water and money. John Koeller, technical adviser at the California Urban Water Conservation Council and the Alliance for Water Efficiency, gave Matthew Shulman of U.S. News some tips on how to conserve.
What new technologies are available to conserve water in the bathroom?
Toilet fixtures ... can yield significant water reduction through new high-efficiency toilets that flush with 1.3 gallons or less. The current standard in the U.S. is 1.6 gallons maximum. If you cannot afford to replace the toilet, at least replace internal parts to get rid of leaks.
Bathroom faucets need aerators that [limit the flow to] a gallon per minute or less. It's still sufficient to shave and wash your hands, but you really don't need the kind of flows that existed maybe 15 or 20 years ago in older homes.
Install a low-flow shower head. Whereas the trend these days in the luxury homes seems to be high-flow shower systems with multiple heads, generally speaking, the trend on the efficient side is to come down to 2 to 2.5 gallons a minute on the shower head.
Let's move to the kitchen.
People are using their dishwashers less and less and less. Why is that? Because people are eating out more and more and more. Dishwashers that used to be used almost once a day are now cycling only 215 times a year. There are many machines out there that now function with less than 6 gallons. In the old days, it was perhaps as much as three times that much water.
How about the laundry room?
Now we have clothes washers that are so efficient that when it comes time to replace your old one, you ought to purchase an Energy Star washer. Energy use generally correlates with water use. So if you look for an Energy Star machine, you're going to see both energy and water use reduction.
What are ways to conserve water outdoors?
First, repair the system—busted sprinkler heads, leaking pipes. Then put a good controller on. There are weather-based controllers—otherwise known as smart controllers—that operate off of either historic or current weather patterns, as opposed to a clock [for watering the lawn]. They adjust themselves to actual weather patterns and to actual plants you're watering by downloading a signal from a satellite every day.
The carwash industry is probably more efficient at washing cars than you are at home with a hose. So, go to a carwash.
What will make people change their water-use habits?
We're seeing more drought conditions and water quality problems, in states you'd never dreamed have water problems. People are thinking: What can I do to help? Water utilities [that] are aggressive are providing financial incentives for customers to change products and hopefully change their habits, too.
Flushing Out Disease
For a staple of life, water sure can cause a lot of trouble. Disease-bearing microbes, like the ones responsible for cholera and typhoid, happily hitchhike in the water from one city to another, infecting thousands of people along the way. A single cholera epidemic in London in 1848 claimed 14,600 lives.
These epidemics didn't become a matter of life and death in the United States until the mid-1800s, when cities proliferated, population density spiked, and more people were connected by waterways.
"Cholera is really a 19th-century disease," says David Rosner, a professor of history and public health at Columbia University. "Before that, epidemics were located in very specific places and tended not to travel very far."
As both population and industry grew, cities that had relied on nearby rivers found their water contaminated with the sewage and chemical waste of everything upstream. At around the same time, the first epidemiologists were rethinking how diseases like cholera spread and debunking assumptions that the plagues were airborne. In 1854, British physician John Snow famously traced an outbreak of cholera in London's Soho district to a single water pump, lending strong evidence to the notion that water was responsible for the spread of the deadly disease.
Before the practice of chlorinating water became common in the United States in the early 20th century, many cities combated the spread of waterborne diseases by bringing in water from more remote sources and separating their water supplies. New York City drew much of its water from the Croton River in modern-day Westchester County and later began tapping the Catskills with a lengthy series of aqueducts. Federal regulations slowly caught up with state efforts to mandate cleaner water, culminating in the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974. Outside the United States, however, limited access to potable water remains a debilitating health hazard in many developing countries. –Chris Wilson
More on water conservation, including a video: www.usnews.com/water
This story appears in the June 4, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.