The 2017 documentary about water and power in California was eye opening. Spoiler alert, the Southwest needs more water. Two great options are desalination and urban water recycling.
The irony of the show comes at the very last scene. The resident of Porterville, which has been without running water for a long time, finally gets a government subsidized water holding tank and fill up for he and his wife’s home. The scene shows him very happy, washing his hands in his kitchen sink, something he hasn’t been able to do for some time. The ironic part is that he keeps the water running while lathering has hands for approximately 10 seconds 🤦.
After all this time without water, at the first sign of relief, water is wasted.
10 seconds, that’s nothing you say! Well, let’s find out. I measured the flow rate of my kitchen sink which came out to be approximately 73.25 mL/s or 0.0194 gal/s. That’s a pretty small number, but consider this:
- The CDC recommends we lather our hands for 20 seconds when washing our hands.
- We’ll assume the average time is 10 seconds.
- Between eating meals and restroom breaks, we’ll assume the average person washes their hands five times per day.
How much water is wasted while lathering if we do not turn off the faucet while lathering?
(1) ![\begin{equation*} 0.0194 \enskip \left[\frac{gal}{s} \right] \times 10 \enskip [s] \times 5 = 0.97 \enskip [gal], \end{equation*}](https://necessarylifeskills.org/wp-content/ql-cache/quicklatex.com-4ca6e6f8c9e1500c1b4d9afd6b9b9160_l3.png "Rendered by QuickLaTeX.com")
Ok, so if every person wastes nearly a gallon of water per day, and there are 39.2 million people living in California, that’s approximately 39 million gallons of water wasted EVERY DAY! Feel free to play with the assumptions and see how it affects this number.
Moral of the post: turn off the water while you lather hands, then turn it back on to rinse the soap off.
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