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Around the House

4) Water:

Given the boom in the world’s population during the past century, the need for clean water has been becoming increasingly more vital. Between India and China and much of Asia, political battles are already breaking out over who controls the sources of the world’s most abundant and most used freshwater source: the basin of the Himalayas. While this doesn’t affect many of us yet, it will be a pressing issue in the near future. Most European countries would suffer from dehydration if forced to rely on freshwater sources within their borders, and much of their water is being imported from places like the Himalayas, where resources are beginning to wear thin.

Doing what we can now and being more environmentally conscious will help us adjust to a more sustainable lifestyle, which, when it comes to water, is going to be a necessity, not just a “green” choice.

1. Reduce! Anyone can do with just a little awareness, and there are so many ways to make your life more eco-friendly.
• Take showers over baths. Baths use several times the water of showers. (I know this is akin to sacrilege in Japan, because baths are a part of the untouchable culture to many people, but it’s worth a try)
• Keep a 5-minute limit to your showers. I realize that most foreigners are tenants and can’t switch over to low-pressure gauges, but try your best to keep the pressure down. It could cut the amount of water you use in half.
• Just turn it off… when you’re washing the dishes, brushing your teeth, between any action when you’re use water, just turn it off. 5 seconds of running water here and there adds up on a years scale.
2. Reuse! Get creative! There’s no end to the ways you can use and reuse water.
   • bath water: plug it up with you take a shower (or bath). If you buy a pump for kerosene heaters from the supermarket, you can pump our that water when your finished and reuse it in a number of ways, such as…

     flushing your toilet…I learned this when I was in Southeast Asia, where people substitute running water (of which there was none) with rainwater and a bucket. I know western toilet manners have indoctrinated us against such crude methods, but if you pour the water their the toilet yourself––pump in to a bucket, or pail it yourself by hand, then pour it down the drain––gravity will do all the work for you. Flushing is just a luxury that the majority of the world doesn’t have.

     laundry…this is a little more conventional and practiced with some frequency in Japan. Some people will use the same pump method, others actually have their home plumbing re-routed to drain bath water into their toilets and laundry machine. But again, this is a luxury renters cannot afford, so the simple hand-powered bucket works just as well, and eliminates a good deal of water that would otherwise be wasted on laundry.

     One more tip on laundry, you can reduce the number of cycles that the machine washes your clothes to once (normally the machine will wash and rinse, using two full loads of water).

   • rain water: set up a few buckets or invest in a rain barrel to collect free water. You can’t beat free, and water is nature’s free gift. Use it to water your plants or flush your toilet. Due to problems with insect larvae in standing water, I don’t recommend this for many other purposes. Just beware of mosquitoes in the summer. There are organic ways of solving this too, such as Bt bacteria (Bacillus thuringiensis), which attack mosquito larvae but pose no threat to other life forms.
3. On Bottled Water vs Filter: The choice seems pretty simple. Filters are reusable and utilize your local water source, whereas the mineral stuff has been packaged in PET plastic and transported, using extra oil in the bottling and shipping process.

That’s all for now, but if you have any more creative ideas to add please contact us at coordinator@beejapan.org Peace, Salem