The Good Guide to Reducing Your Water Use, Part 1: Bathroom
1A: A (Clean) Toilet Hack
Potential water savings: Up to 18 gallons per day, per person.
How to easily reduce the water wasted by every flush.
Toilets waste tons of water every year. When you flush, that’s about five or six gallons right there if you have a conventional toilet, and on average we each flush six times a day. Thankfully, there are now all sorts of products to lessen gallons per flush. There are low-cost add-ons like the Toilet Tummy or the British-made Hippo the Water Saver. You can also purchase a dual-flush toilet, which can save up to five gallons per flush by offering one kind of flush for each bodily function. But the lower-tech and less-well-heeled among us might want to try this easy and free hack.
1B: A (Dirty) Toilet Hack
Potential water savings: Up to 36 gallons per day, per person.
How to forgo water altogether, without a flush.
Most of the readers of the Urban Homestead blog, a guide to self-reliant city living, buy in to the lifestyle strategies of authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen. Except one: composting your own feces. “It horrifies most people,” Knutzen admits. For Knutzen, an adherent of “humanure” guru Joseph Jenkins, the practice makes perfect sense. “Nitrogen makes plants grow,” he says. “You flush it down the toilet and create pollution in our riverways. So you are taking two valuable things and making trash.” Instead, Knutzen suggests following these five steps to composting your own solids.
View the entire guide: http://www.good.is/post/good-guide-to-reducing-your-water-use-part-1-bathroom/#/about/what_is_good
