April 20, 2011
I received a letter yesterday from Ashley C, who is ten years old. She wrote:
"For my project for Earth Day, I’m going to go around my
park and pick up trash. Also, I’m going to go around the house in the
morning, afternoon, and at night and look at the faucets and turn off all of the dripping water.
Do you think that would be good?"
Checking for dripping faucets (and fixing them) is a very good idea. You can actually calculate (not exactly, but roughly) how much water a dripping faucet wastes with this simple calculator created by the US Geological Survey. I used their calculator to estimate what would happen if your home had 3 faucets dripping every 3 seconds. That would be 86,400 drips every day, which comes to about 5 gallons of water wasted every day. And if you waste 5 gallons a day, that is almost 2,000 gallons a year!
Click here to read other stories that I have written about the importance of conserving water. While it’s true that our planet Earth looks like a big blue ball because 75% of it is covered by water, a lot of that water is not usable in that form, either because it is salt water (in the oceans) or because it is frozen (in glaciers and the polar icecaps). Water, which all life needs to survive, is a limited resource that we must conserve and protect.
What are you doing this Earth Week to contribute to the global effort to pledge a Billion Acts of Green? Click on "Comments," at the bottom of this story, and tell me what you are doing. We will publish all your comments in one big article at the end of Earth Week, to honor each writer’s promise to protect our planet, and inspire other readers to do the same.
Posted by: Seymour Simon
