Why are we flushing the toilet with clean drinking water?

Every time you go to the toilet it uses about 9 till 12 litres of water. So if you count the times that you use the toilet and the times that the rest of your family is using the toilet, you will see that you are wasting a lot of clean drinking water. Why not flush the toilet with used water?

The wasting of drinking water is not only when you flush the toilet, but also with a lot of other daily actions. When you take some water to drink, you first let the tap run before you actually take the water.  This is the same when you rinse your mouth after brushing your teeth or when you take a shower. There is also a lot of wasting of drinking water when people doing the dishes while the water is running or watering the plants in the summer. For all these problems are solutions, but who is working on these solutions? First you decide to save the drinking water and after two weeks you forgot your intentions.

Let’s focus on the toilet. Nowadays you can choose for a toilet who is using 50% of the water of a classical toilet, but still it is wasting a lot of clean drinking water. We can use water from the shower you took, the water you used for doing the dishes or from brushing your tooth.

Some facts:

• Toilets use about 30% of the total water used in a household.

• The average toilet uses about 9 – 12 litres of drinking water, whereas half flush uses less than 6 litres.

• Each person is using 4757 litres of drinking water to flush the toilet, every year.

• The average person flushes the toilet five times daily.

• Per person you pay almost €200, - euro a year for flushing the toilet.

In my opinion it is important to save the clean drinking water we have. What if there is one day no clean drinking water anymore? People should feel sorry when they realize that they flushed the toilet with all the clean water. 

This photo tells the story form the wasting of drinking water by flushing the toilet. You can do it different. Here you can use the water pump to pump the water out of the ground and use it for flushing the toilet. You use the dirty water which wouldn’t be used as drinking water.

Marla de Haan

Resources:

http://www.waterwise.org.uk/pages/indoors.html#sthash.durGwaAJ.dpuf
http://www.brico.be/wabs/nl/19061/bouwliefhebber/raad-van-de-maand/tips-om-water-te-besparen-in-huis-en-tuin.do
http://www.impatientoptimists.org/Posts/2013/03/We-have-better-things-to-do-with-clean-water-than-flush-it-down-the-toilet
http://www.whitehorse.vic.gov.au/IgnitionSuite/uploads/docs/Sustainable%20Living%20Guide%20Water.pdf
http://www.threeactionsproject.org/Actions/Reduce-Toilet-Flushes.php
http://gemiddeldgezien.nl/meer-gemiddelden/16-kosten/232-gemiddelde-kosten-voor-1-liter-water