Water, water, everywhere..?

This summer has been surprisingly rain-free.
So far.
Although we are forecast “Soggy Saturday” tomorrow.

But usually, here in good old Blighty, we are not exactly short of the wet stuff.
Which is probably why we all get so outraged when there is the merest hint of a hospipe ban.

But worldwide, it is a very different picture.

There is basically the same amount of water around now as there was millions of years ago when the dinosaurs were stomping about.
It gets used and then recycled through that very cleverest of things, the Water Cycle (drag your mind back to GCSE Geography)

BUT, there are now a few more demands on our fresh water, than there were when T-Rex was on the rampage.
Like 7 BILLION people for example.

Since 1950, global water use has nearly tripled.
70% of the fresh water available for human use goes towards growing food and raising animals.
The average US diet takes 4997 litres of water A DAY to produce (and I suspect the UK diet would be pretty much the same).
And it’s not just food. I read this great post on The Hessian Sack the other day, that it takes about 2,720 litres of water to produce enough cotton for ONE t-shirt.
Pollution of the waterways from run-off from farming and industry is a huge problem-70% of industrial wastes are dumped untreated into the waterways, rendering it undrinkable
Nearly a BILLION people lack access to safe drinking water

Wow.
I kind of knew water was important, but I hadn’t quite computed just quite how important.
I have always taken it for granted, and not really thought about how lucky we are to able to go to a tap, and get clean, drinkable, life-saving water.

So this is a post to say, “Save Your Water”.
It may be the most precious resource we have.
I am sure we will come up with viable alternatives to oil for energy (whether it will be before we have destroyed the planet is another matter) but we literally cannot survive without clean, fresh drinking water.

Please don’t complain if we have a hosepipe ban. We don’t know how lucky we are to be able to use this most precious of things, just to keep our gardens looking pretty, or our kids happy running through sprinklers.

And here are some water saving tips. Please add your own in the comments!

• Get a water butt
• Keep an old milk bottle near the tap, and then run the tap into it while waiting for the water to get hot/cold, then decant into your water butt
• You can tip washing up water on your plants, as long as they are not lettuces and things (otherwise they might taste a bit soapy)
• Half drunk cups of water that the kids infuriatingly leave around can go into the water butt
• You can empty the bath water onto your plants too, again, the non-edible ones (we tried pouring the water from the baby bath into our water butt when BigSmall was tiny, forgetting that there might be the old speck of baby poo floating around in it-our water butt water was not pleasant…)
• Put a brick in your cistern to reduce the amount of water used with each flush
• And talking of flushing, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down”…
• Shower not bath
• Take shorter showers
• You can get special adapters for your shower head to limit the amount of water coming out (put still be more than a trickle!)
• I got this tip from the lovely people at Start-when you turn the shower on and are waiting for it to warm up, place a bucket underneath! I LOVE this-just need to find a bucket
• If you are very dedicated, apparently you can also shower over a bucket-not sure I have the dexterity necessary to shower over a bucket, but let me know if you give it a go!

Come on then, lets hear them!