Day 3 of Project Save the Colorado River

It's day three of our lived ethics project, and subsequently of my effort to save the Colorado River, all by myself, through conserving water. So far, I've found out that I wasn't really thinking about water use too much (even once I'd started the project), until I put the grey water bucket in the bath tub and took my first shower. Standing partially in a bucket made me (uncomfortably) hyper-conscious of the amount of water I was using in that one shower (so I took an army shower--turned off the water each time I shampooed or soaped), as well as made me think twice before flushing the toilet. That's partially due to the fact that I found out that:

One minute with a normal shower head = 2.5 gallons of water (and I usually take about an 8-minute shower, so that's 20 gallons of water right there)

One flush of a normal toilet = 3 gallons of water.

I'm going to be honest here and say that I'm not the most frequent shower-er in the world, usually about once every two days, so I've only taken one shower with the bucket so far. However, in my approximately 7.5-minute shower, I was able to fill up the bucket all the way. The bucket itself (which can be seen below) is 5 gallons, so that's two minutes of shower water that I caught, and almost 2 toilet flushes. I flushed the toilet with it once today, and my roommates used it another time, so we saved 5 gallons of toilet-flushing water. Sweet.

More fun facts that I found out, about water use: the average US citizen uses about 100 gallons of water per day (often called gallons per capita per day, or GPCD), BUT the crazy thing is that on average, GPCD for those living in western states is even HIGHER, closer to 125 gallons. This makes very little sense, given the fact that we're in a much drier part of the country, but is in part due to our attitude that all of our lawns have to be green; it takes more water to make this so in a dry western climate.

My next goal is to think every time I turn on the sink (because I'm not quite at that level of hyper-sensitivity yet). I find that as a human, I can quickly be trained into habits (like doing my dishes when they get dirty, etc.), especially if I associate them with something; I'm now going to try and think of an image of the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers in Canyonlands, Utah (see below) every time I touch a sink handle.

(yes, it's supposed to be that brown; that's really healthy for the Colorado River! The clear, cold water you see below Glen Canyon Dam and running through the Grand Canyon is much less conducive to aquatic life.)