by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
By using less water you can help to reduce the fall in groundwater levels, thereby also and especially reducing stress on woodlands.
This is also what needs to be considered as regards to bottled water, for the extraction of the same from the groundwater sources from whence it comes puts also an undue stress on the groundwater level and resources.
Conserving water is, aside from rejecting bottled water, the first step too reducing the stress on the groundwater resources. Every time that you flush the toilet about about two gallons of perfectly good water is lost down the drain.
When it comes to the use of water in the toilet the first move has to be not to rush to flush if it only a pee, or, as someone else put it, “if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down”. Water-based sewage has become a main contributor to the global shortage of clean (drinking) water.
Taking a bath is another one of those water wasting culprits. Each time you take a bath and empty the tub around ten to twenty gallons of water, if not more, go down the drain and while that water is then no longer clean it still is a lot. A four-minute shower is as good as regards to getting clean – better, in fact – than a bath, and much better by way of water conservation.
The water cycle that many of us have been taught during our school years, the one where all water that goes via rivers to sea eventually comes back to us as rain does not, actually, work that way; or not any longer.
We are putting much more water into the seas than the evaporation can bring back to us as moisture-laden clouds and hence as rain.
The same water that comes out of the sewage systems carries also nutrients into the sea and the fresh water via the rivers not only raises the sea levels – no one seems to consider that one when they talk about rising sea levels and all they talk about is melting ice caps – and changes the chemical balance and salinity of the water of the oceans.
We must reduce our use of water or should I better call it the abuse of water and households are not the biggest culprits here either; industry is and also farming, but reducing we must our use of it.
Bottled water, as said, also contribute to that as the water comes from either springs – in other words groundwater – or from public sources, that is to say, municipal supplies, or in short, the tap. So, lets drink tap water and use refillable bottles.
© 2010
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