Parent Time

When you’re trying to go green, try starting with the blue. According to Environment Canada, we use twice as much water as our European counterparts, at less than half the price. Here are some easy ways to cut down your water.

• Don’t be such a hoser. Sweep your driveway and walkway instead of washing them down with a hose.

• Wash your car with a bucket of soapy water and rinse with a trigger hose. A running garden hose can waste about 20 L of water per minute. Consider cleaning your car on the grass and not your driveway to prevent runoff from seeping into your local groundwater.

• About 650f indoor home water use happens in the bathroom, and toilets are the single biggest perpetrators. Replace your throne with an ultra-low flush model; newer ones can use 50 to 80 0.000000e+000ss water.

• Fix that faucet. A dripping tap can waste enough water to fill 33 bathtubs over the course of a year.

• And you’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating: Turn off the tap when you’re brushing your teeth and shaving, and stop your money from going down the drain.

Hitting the bottle
• Canadians drink about 60 L of bottled water each a year, and about 40% of what they buy is simply tap water with minerals that are added to improve the taste.

• Put that bottle in the blue box — the plastic used to make water bottles is so durable that it’ll take about 1,000 years to biodegrade.

• A study has found that concentrations of antimony, a potentially harmful chemical, increase the longer water is stored in plastic containers. Antimony is a white metallic element that in small doses can cause nausea, dizziness and depression.

• Recycling and reusing beverage containers saves 2.3 million barrels of crude oil a year, in Canada alone. – Dana Dougherty Reinke

• A one-litre bottle of Dasani water costs about $1.59 in Toronto grocery stores – about 3,000 times the price of a litre of municipal water from nearby Brampton, where the container was filled by Coca-Cola Bottling Co.

Originally published in Today's Parent, July 2007