In these times...

Every now and then it comes up how there are limited resources available and we have to conserve and recycle to ensure not wasting valuable resources.

I know it's not your everyday subject and well hmm warning this may not be a nice and fluffy warm feeling subject...

Anywho... after a bathroom visit (at work we have these big bathrooms with stalls and all that). I was thinking about water consumption and how much water is actually used when flushing a standard toilet.

What brought me to that was that as I entered a stall was "occupied" by a cell phone talking individual (yeah that's another weird topic but tends to happen a lot).

Trying to avoid too much detail. This person hmm performed "the business" and immediately flushed the toilet. Then some "paper work" and flush the toilet. More "paper work" and flush the toilet. It ended up being flushed 5 times while I was in there and some of the times to get rid of paper...

Now I looked up how much water a standard US toilet is using per flush (see water usage). It turns out to use 3.5 - 5 gallons/flush!!!

For this one person that's a visit requiring at least 17.5 gallons of water (up to 25 gallons using the upper estimate). That's 4 flushes or 14 gallons of water wasted...

Now figure that the building I am in (multi company) has about 150 people. About 80% or so will have business during the day like that and if everyone where to use the same amount of resources (water) that would be using 2100 Gallons of water flushing the toilet and of that 1680 gallons would be nothing but waste... and that's per day... Now a work week being 5 days it would waste 8400 gallons a week in just one little building in Northern Virginia.

Man that is a surprising waste and if only everyone would think those limited resources would be plenty full for hundreds of years...

that would be the thought of the day ;-)