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?
Why is it that you always pretend the world is so black and white that only westerners have bathtubs?
The last three apartments I lived in in Europe didn’t have a bathtub and the house I shortly inhabited in south africa even had a small indoor pool with a shower head.
I think it’s pretty much proven that a shower ‘uses’ 70L or so of water and a bathtub about 200L. The thing is, you can’t really use water, only make it dirty.
If you have wastewater treatment, it’s mostly irrelevant how much water you use. I guess the most important part is how the water is heated.
I usually just shower and like to take a bath maybe once a month to once a week for relaxation? The more stressed I am, the more baths I take. So stopping human stress may be good for the environment after all…
Water treatment is also costly and even though you might have a small effect, you should try to use the least water you can. But yeah, heating is definitely a concern too.
Actually, no. The sewage system needs to be flushed with lots of water or huge, rotting balls of fat and feces accumulate and need to be cleaned up.
There isn’t a danger of breaking the system by not using enough water. The amount of water we use to flush a toilet is enough to convey feces to a treatment plant. We get fat clogs because fats, oils, and grease (FOG) don’t mix with water, float, and can cling to the walls (especially cold walls where FOG solidifies) of pipes. That’s why sewer organizations try to get people not to send FOG down the drain and why they don’t say ‘just make sure you rinse it down the sink real good.’
edit: Also, yes perfect wastewater treatment would put water right back to the source, but almost every system just sends it downhill to the nearest, largest body of water. Then we wait for nature to cycle it back up hill for us. In many places use is outpacing natural renewal and that is why water conservation is critical in those areas.
In areas with more water than they need it is still important to the climate change to reduce water use. Both making drinking water and processing wastewater take huge amounts of energy. Wastewater treatment alone is the number one consumer of energy, and I live in a populated area with a strong industrial sector. Saving water saves carbon too.
Good points, but often the ‘water saving’ feature of some toilet flushing systems is not putting enough water through. Europeans use a lot of toilet paper instead of bidets.
So while you may be right the main source of fatballs is fat, it’s still not helping that people try to conserve water at the wrong places.
I know that there are problems with trash including products marketed as flushable that aren’t, but I’ve never heard talk of too much actual toilet paper (even the super plush stuff) outside of personal lines like the ones that connect your house to the municipal sewer or septic tank. For reference I live in the US where bidets are a novelty. I work along side sewage conveyance folks and am curious to prevent future issues. Do you know of anywhere where low flow has specifically caused a problem that could be a cautionary tale?
There’s a whole paper on this which an environmental engineer friend of mine sent me:
McDermott, R. , Strong, A. and Griffiths, P. (2019) Solid Transfer in Low Flow Sewers, the Distance Travelled So Far Is Not Enough. Journal of Environmental Protection, 10, 164-207. doi: 10.4236/jep.2019.102011.
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=90286
Thanks! This is great and comes with a whole pile of cited material.
tldr; Our pipes need water to work. Low flows and intermittent flows can be a contributor to blockages, but are not in the top causes. What about baths (pretending this is all on topic)? If you take a bath, the best way to drain your tub to maintain your home’s pipes would be to let some water slowly trickle through to wet down anything that has dried in the pipes, then open the drain all the way to rinse them clean.
Now a longer summary of relevant points. It is a meta study. The main flaw in the study is that they are aggregating data from small pipes like those in your home with the large pipes that are managed by your sewer service. In doing that they conflate the ability to move poop through your toilet with preventing sewage backups that would flood a street. Flaws and all, it has tons of merit. Here is what they showed as the most common contributing causes of sewer blockages with how many authors cite the cause: 7 authors - tree roots; 5 authors - flushing non-flushables; 4 authors - depth of pipe (because of potential collapse and tree root intrusion), fats oils and grease, small diameter, quality of construction; 3 authors - flat gradients, joint material/type (because of breakages), junctions (shape of flow), ground conditions (ground movement breaks pipes), intermittent flow, solid deposition (poop, tp, and garbage settling out, it’s bad if they’re allowed to dry in place here’s where low flow and intermittent flow could combine to cause issues); 2 authors - age of sewer, self-cleansing velocity (having frequent enough high volume flows to wash the pipe).
Nice tldr amd analysis! Yeah, modern piping wouldn’t require that much flow.
it belonges to where you live and how much water is there…
you can not store water. if it comes out of a mountain, it will run down. if you use it or not. why not using it?