How our family saves hundreds of litres of water a year with a bucket, some garden hose, and a few $20.00 hardware attachments (happy World Water Day, Mother Earth!)

March 7, 2017

World Water Day, March 22, is an excellent time to reflect on how much our survival as a species is connected to the fate of this precious resource.

Water is threatened on all sides by pollution, privatization, and industrial and domestic overuse, yet we often treat it as though it were a limitless commodity, a kind of earth-abuse that will come back to haunt us and our descendants for years to come.

Wanting to shrink our ungainly eco-footprint with respect to water, my family has been able to reduce its water intake to about one-quarter of the Canadian national average. Between October of 2015 and October 2016, our most recent annual water billing period, we have averaged around 250 litres per day–in our household of three people, or just over 80 litres per person per day (by comparison, a March 18, 2009 National Post story states the average single Canadian and American uses about 340 litres per day).

Read More