Conclusions From Taking Shorter Showers
What I learned during my DOT project to take shorter showers is that I really like the luxury of taking long, hot showers. I have learned that I can take a quick, thorough shower if necessary, but I will probably not continue to take shorter showers now that the project is complete.
During this project I saved more than 930 liters of wasted shower water, which is almost 62% of my estimated shower water usage from my baseline! As you can see in my data log for this project, I went from always taking at least 6–7 minutes to shower to taking showers as short as 3 minutes. But is this really significant?
During my baseline week, I used 375.37 liters of water, which averages to 53.62 liters per day. This is much more than the 20.39 liters per day on average I used during the DOT project. Assuming everyone has the same baseline and amount of water saved, if everyone in the U.S. (assuming a population of 327.2 million people) did my DOT project, we would save 3,969,240,763,429 liters of water per year. That’s 1,048,562,478,779 gallons! However, in 2015 we used 117,530,000,000,000 gallons of water, meaning that we would only actually be saving 0.274% of our national water usage.
So although it seems like a lot when you look at it on such a large scale, there are many other more impactful things you can do to lessen your ecological footprint without giving up your leisurely showers. For example, many of my friends who were doing the DOT project chose to go vegan or vegetarian. This has a much greater impact, as animal agriculture is extremely resource intensive. Simply doing one thing is not enough to change the world, but it is a good start towards an environmentally friendly future.
