From a Guest Blogger: Five Ways to Use Less Water in the Office

Although life on earth could not subsist without water, the waste of this precious commodity causes many environmental problems. Worldwide, millions of people do not have easy access to safe, clean water, yet in first-world countries, few people think twice about getting water from the tap.

Practices in the office can make a huge difference in the amount of water a person uses each day. Consider these five practices that can help you reduce your daily water footprint:

1. Reduce the amount of paper you use.   Read emails on your computer screen and resist the urge to send everything to the printer. Even attachments can be opened on your computer rather than printed in order to save paper. For each sheet of paper you save, you save about 10 litres of water.

2. Don’t run the dishwasher in the break room. Usually, you can keep communal food-preparation areas tidy by washing a sink full of used dishes each day. Don’t leave the water running either. Simply fill a dishpan with soapy water to wash and rinse the clean dishes in another pan filled with clean water. There’s no need to waste water and energy by rinsing dishes, putting them in the dishwasher and running a partially full dishwasher each evening.

3. Don’t leave the water running when you wash your hands. When you use the loo at work, everyone wants you to wash your hands, but you don’t have to leave a steady stream of water running as you lather up. Instead, dampen your hands, turn off the tap, apply the soap and turn the tap back on when you’re ready to rinse. Turning off the tap can save as much as six litres of water per minute.

4. Turn off or report drips. A leaky tap can waste as much as 15 litres of water a day.

5. Don’t use the toilet as a bin. Every flush requires a lot of water. Each flush you save can save as much as nine litres of water. Keep your conservation ideals in mind when choosing a company to manage  your office’s washroom services – some will have more green credentials than others.

Each of these water-saving tips   might seem fairly simple. Their results may also seem rather ineffective unless you take a closer look. If you follow each of these five tips every day, here’s how much water would be saved:

Instead of printing out three emails to take to your meeting, you save them on your computer to read and review there. This saves 30 litres of water. Rather than using 30 litres of water to run the dishwasher at the end of the day, you wash dishes by hand, using only four litres. This saves 26 litres. If you turn off the water three times while washing your hands for one minute, you have save an additional 18 litres. For argument’s sake, let’s say there were no dripping taps in the building. There won’t be any savings there, but you’ll remember it in the future. When you wipe your nose on a tissue, toss it in the bin rather than flushing it down the toilet, and you’ve saved the final nine litres. With this conservative estimate, in a single day these tips save 83 litres of water. You could say that is definitely more than a drop in the bucket.