We all know that baths take a ton of water, I mean you literally have to fill up a tub, and even the smallest one is pretty big. Plus, you don’t need baths, plenty of people only have a shower in their house and they’re fine, actually, I’d wager only a minority of people in the world, mostly Westerners, even have access to a personal bathtub.
So what do you think about taking baths (in the Western style where you drain the water after each user, not talking about public baths or hot tubs)? Do you think it’s fine occasionally in order to relax? Or do you think the massive water usage is never justified? Going further, do you think new houses should be built without bathtubs, only showers?
Is luxury ok occasionally? Sure, if a thing brings you happiness it has value and hopefully people can make a choice if that happiness is worth the real cost of the luxury. I don’t think the solution to most of the really big problems is for people to give up the small pleasures in their lives. It is demoralizing and alienating to tell people (or yourself) that they are failing because they aren’t perfect. For the record, I don’t personally like baths, so that isn’t just me rationalizing my bad behavior.
I tried a quick search for any data on how much water is wasted on baths (in the US) and didn’t find good info. Is this really a problem? Yes baths use a fair bit of water each, but what is the total? Is it worth the huge political fight that will come with it? One thing I could find is that in the US daily usage on lawns and gardens is 15% or about 48 gal per household. The average bath tub is 35 gallons. One bath a day per household with a gray water reuse system would cover a decent fraction of irrigation use and result in no additional waste (with the flawed assumptions that water use is spread evenly by household, and that we should be using that much water on grass).
I feel like anything looking at an individual level misses the mark though. I don’t think this is a problem we can pick at the edges of and solve. We waste water in leaky delivery infrastructure; we waste water by mixing storm, gray, and black water; and then we take our partially cleaned water and put it into the biggest down slope waterbody we can find (instead of recharging the source). That’s not even touching on industrial uses. Yes, we all should address our own uses, but a lot of the problem is just baked into the system and only in the reach of collective action and significant investement.
If you want to get involved find your local water supplier and wastewater managing entities and follow what they’re doing. Push them to do better at public meetings and planning sessions. You don’t need to have the answers, just show them that there is a call from the community to be innovative, push big ideas, and make real change.
Giving the grass a bath smdh.
tbf giving the grass a bath is probably better for the environment than giving yourself a bath.