Things I thought about while going pee today.
First of all, let me just say that I am not an avid toilet flusher. This may seem gross to some people until you hear what I just came up with. But seriously, before I blow your mind, I just wanted to come right out and say that I personally do not flush the toilet after going #1. Only after going #2, usually. That is because up until today, I have always thought that it is very important to save water. Now, I find it EXTREMELY important. Here is why:
The average amount of water that it takes to flush a toilet is 5-7 gallons. Lets round it off to a happy sounding 6 gallons. Now, there are roughly 303, 622, 602 people in the United States. Of those 303, 622, 602, let us guess-timate that 2% of those are not potty trained and do not use toilets on a daily basis (infants and those of us who pee outside on bushes). That makes for about 297, 550, 149 regular toilet users in the United States. Lets estimate that each one of these toilet users pees 3 times a day (in the toilet) and flushes it each time. That would make for 18 gallons of water per person flushed down the toilet, per day. That means America uses 5,355 ,902,682 gallons of water a day or 1,954,904,478,930 (that’s TRILLIONS) gallons per year to flush their pee. I know this is a lot of numbers and you are probably looking for a point already but I am almost there! OK, so the Great Lakes combined have about 6,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water in them. At the rate we are going, if America keeps flushing the toilet every time we pee, that alone will dry up the Great Lakes within 3000 years from now.
But with all of our industrial, commercial and personal uses for water, toilet flushing only accounts for LESS THAN 1% of the water that us Americans use up every day. Isn’t that unbelievable that we are using up Earth’s most natural resource as quickly as we are? It doesn’t have to be this way. We can each do our own part to save gallons and gallons of fresh water per person/per day. So think about little things like not flushing the toilet the next time you pee. It is really not all that gross…in fact, it is quite sterile. Here is another list of facts I found out about our outrageous water usage.