Wash On, Wash Off (Emphasis on the “Off” part)

It has now been five days since I wrote the paragraph above, which means that am five days into my sustainable behavior challenge. I know that the thousands of people who read my blog posts can’t wait to hear how it has gone so far, so I will not keep my loyal fans waiting. I posted in my previous entry the times I spent in the shower on any given day, and I will do the same for the five days that I have recorded this week.

Wednesday- 8:04-8:12

Thursday- 8:53-9:03

Friday- 10:15-10:26

Saturday- 11:03-11:14

Sunday- 11:01-11:16

These times are still horrendous, and look even worse now that I have them written down. However, since I am always the eternal optimist, these times are MUCH better than last weeks. Its been hard, but it appears to working, at least somewhat. Obviously the hardest part about the challenge so far is forcing myself to turn the knob of the hot water off every morning. The thought of leaving the nice, steamy shower and walking out into the cold, dark, cave-like hallways of Farber, when compared to staying the shower for a few more minutes, is obviously not the favorable choice. However, forcing myself to do just that is also by far the most rewarding and positive aspect of the challenge so far. When I finally do get out the shower and look at the clock, and see that I’m a good 5 minutes earlier than I should be feel fantastic. That’s 5 minutes of water that isn’t being wasted today.

Overall, my behavior change has had profound impact on how I view the world around me. Even before I started this challenge, if I would ever see a water bottle or something like that in a garbage can, I would sometimes reach in, take it out, and recycle it. Now I have been doing that ALL the time for the past week. Monitoring my shower times and looking at how much water I waste has made me more aware of just how wasteful everyone is, not just in terms of water usage.

This leads into my next point. Just how much water does a long shower waste? According to this website, an average shower uses approximately 7 gallons per minute. As I know from the study that I linked to in my previous post, the average shower time is 8 minutes. Let’s use my average shower time of 15 minutes as an example. Thats an additional 7 minutes of excess showering, meaning 49 wasted gallons of water. 49 gallons of water a day means 343 gallons a week, which means, that just over the course of our sustainability challenge, 1886 gallons of water would be wasted unnecessarily. I know I don’t want that much wasted water on my conscience; I can’t even sleep well as it is. It is of paramount importance to address this now, lest I waste almost 2000 gallons of water just over this next month alone.