Many students using our footprint calculator said that they could not pledge to reduce their home footprints because they were not making the decisions for the household. Here is your chance to design your own sustainable virtual household!
If you had your own home, what would you do to make it more energy efficient? Where would you get your electricity from? Where would your house be? Would you live near to your school or work or local transit options? Where would you get your food from?
MY Family Footprint >
Saving Water
One part of my family's carbon footprint I would like to change is our water consumption. We use up quite a lot of water as a family of 5, even using strategies like shorter showers and reusable water bottles. Recently something we did to reduce waste of water was place a several liter bin in our kitchen sink to collect the water we washed our hands with, and when the bin was full we used it to water some of the plants in our yard rather than use a hose or sprinkler. Channeling that idea, I would would like to make my household more efficient by collecting all of the water we use to wash our hands, and instead reuse it to water the plants. We could attach all of the sinks in our house to tubes leading to irrigation lines in our yard, thus eliminating the need for our sprinkler system, which uses a lot of electricity, and replace it with something that uses little to no electricity.
Hi Giovanni W, I've read your post and I maybe have another possible solution according to your wasting problem. The solution comes from the "Graf water" company which works for the preservation of water. With its underground rainwater harvesting systems you can save up to 50% of drinking water! Maybe your parents will agree to install one of those possible arrangements.
http://www.graf-water.co.uk/rainwater-harvesting.html
Here is also a video explanation of one product:
http://www.graf-water.co.uk/graf-tv/en- … ystem.html
Thank you samuele-forster. The rainwater harvesting system looks like it would work great for reducing my family's water consumption. Thinking about how much water we use daily, reducing that amount by 50% would be outstanding. I wish we would get more rain where we live though, there is not nearly enough for the system to function at full potential. But I really appreciate your idea; if you find out anything else please let me know.
Hello, Giovanni, your idea to reuse your water in your house is very creative and actually seems like a fantastic idea. Another idea is to maybe use a Rain Barrel. This is a little barrel that is at the end of the gutter and catches the rain water to be used. Or another idea could be to try a Rain Garden, this receives water from rooftops, sidewalks, patios, driveways. A shallow dip in the earth is made for the water to travel back into the soil for and to grow the plants.
Here are the Instructions and descriptions of each:
I would also like to reduce the amount of water I use in my home. I found that when I entered in data about my water usage in my home that my carbon footprint increased a lot. I think that this was mostly caused by my shower times. I tend to take very long showers, which is a problem because it wastes water and my water heater is powered by gas, so it is using gas which is even worse. I am trying very hard to fix this problem by taking much shorter showers. I am also starting to wash dishes using room temperature water instead of hot water. I believe that if I am capable of completely sticking to these ideas I will be able to bring down the carbon produced by my home choices a lot, which would also have a very big and positive effect on my overall carbon footprint because my home category was one of the biggest contributors to my high carbon footprint.
I too have a family that overuses water. With 7 people living in my house, and most of us taking a shower everyday, our water consumption is extremely high. Things that I think I could do to decrease this consumption would be 1. Take shorter showers and get my other family members to take shorter showers. 2. Another would be never buying bottled water, but luckily my family does not often do this. Me and my brother both play soccer and my sister dances, so whenever we do these activities we always use glass, reusable water bottles. Lastly, I would like for my family to replace our showers with low flow shower heads in order to reduce our consumption of water.
Here is a link to one of them: https://www.amazon.com/Speakman-S-4002- … showerhead