Water on the brain

The Marina Terra Hotel pool

It's a day for water issues. This morning at 8, I head out with my towel to the local hotel where I have a pool membership I don't use nearly often enough. But the filtration system at the pool is broken again, and I'm directed to the Club de Playa, where I also have swim privileges. But that pool is being cleaned. By now I'm sweating copiously and uttering a few unladylike remarks under my breath, but I soldier on to the next stop, the water store, where I have my bottles refilled.

We're picky about our water bottles, preferring those with handles and screw-on tops. And we like to use our own, having been given in trade many times bottles with slow leaks that we don't discover until we get home. Or days later. I hate to find puddles in my car, on the floor in my kitchen. And most of all, I hate to waste water.

A friendly muchacho cleans my bottles (with soap) and refills them while practicing his English on me. As I'm driving away from the water store, I find the street has flooded just in front of the bank, where a water line has ruptured, I suppose. Gallons are spread out over the asphalt.

Mexico Bob recently sent me a Powerpoint slide show entitled "Sed," which in an entertaining way illustrates the water issue on a global scale. By the end of it I was indeed entertained, but also alarmed (not for the first time). Sort of like watching a good horror movie, a very rare experience. I was able to view it because I'd recently bought OpenOffice, which allows my Mac to read and process PC documents. In addition to providing me with some new facts about the earth's fresh water supply, its subtitles provided a little Spanish practice. Gracias, Bob.

I couldn't possibly entertain as well the slideshow does, but I'll share a few facts to chew on. Or, who knows? Maybe I'm the only person who didn't know all this. But if so, why do so few seem to care?

Our brains are 70% water, our bodies 60%. We can't go more than a week without water. Although most of the planet is covered with water, only 3% is fresh, potable agua and most of that is ice. That leaves us with 0.0007% of the earth's water to drink, flush our toilets, wash our dishes and laundry, and purify for bottled drinking water, etc.

While millions of people elsewhere live on three gallons of water a day, Americans go through about 160 gallons.

I have some friends with a ranch out in the desert, 50 miles from here, who discovered after they'd settled in that there's too much salt in their well water to irrigate most of their plants. So far all they can raise successfully is bouganvillea and olive trees. For everything else, they have to truck in water. They've been desperately investigating desalination, but so far have found nothing affordable, and if they did find anything, it would involved dealing with huge amounts of brine as a byproduct. In another ten years, possibly a lot more landowners are going to be dealing with this problem as salt water intrusion expands.

So I've been thinking about ways to save water. I know anything I come up with would be an infinitesimal drop in the bucket, so to speak, but if enough of us came up with more ideas, and actually put them into practice, maybe we could reach critical mass and it could become cool to save water.

• If you brush your teeth with the tap running, you use four gallons of water. With the tap off, a quarter-gallon. Suppose you had a clean recycled bottle of water, say a quart, in the bathroom that you use to rinse your mouth, and a glass to swish clean your toothbrush?

• By hand-washing dishes, you're just filling the double sink a couple of times at most, if there are a lot of dishes. I know this is not for everyone, but I'm curious how much water a dishwasher uses.

• In Brazil there's a big media campaign with a droll animated video urging people to pee in the shower, that it saves three gallons each time you don't flush. (And yes, I do that. The trick is to do it early on in the shower.)

• I'm wondering how much water Felipe is saving now that he has reduced the amount of grassy area in his lawn just by redesigning it (very attractively, I might add) and paving part of it with stones. Not to speak of the amount of sweat he's saving, not having to mow so much.

• I read years ago that a shower uses less water than a tub bath. That didn't make sense to me. If I stand under a shower for ten minutes, as opposed to a quick five-minute shower with the water off while I'm lathering up, there's bound to be a variable in there somewhere. But a tub is a tub, it holds only so much water (unless you spend three hours in it and refill every half hour or so, but who has that kind of time?)

• Just curious... how much water is reclaimed by each air conditioner, that ends up just flowing outside. It doesn't look like a lot, but what if we could save it?

I've only begun brewing ideas to save water, and I'll share others that I come across. Of course, there are those in the MAWGM (Might As Well Get Mine) camp who maintain that the world is going to run out of water no matter what puny contributions we make toward saving it, so why let everybody else use it up while we deny ourselves? But you could look at it another way: one day the skills we're talking about here might come in handy for survival, when rationing looms.

If you have some good ideas to share, post them on your blog and if they apply to me, I promise to try them. I noticed Steve has water on the brain, too, but his post today is a lot funnier.