Comment by lxe 3 days ago
> Average per-capita domestic water use in the US is 82 gallons per day. By comparison, German homes use around 33 gallons per person per day, UK homes use around 37 gallons, and French homes use around 39 gallons.
I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?
As with most things, I think there's multiple things. US home also tend to be larger, meaning the hot water line is longer from the tank to the shower. Most americans I know tend to leve the shower running before they get in so it "warms up". I've never been in a European shower that's required that.
Not just the bigger homes, from what I can tell in US home construction the length of the hot water pipe isn't a consideration at all, while it is a common consideration in European homes. In Europe (vast overgeneralization incoming) it's not unusual to have a boiler or a tankless water heater directly in the bathroom to keep the line short, and then have the kitchen close by. Having multiple water heaters per home is also completely normal and a common solution if the kitchen is too far from the bathroom or multiple bathrooms are far from each other. In the US the norm seems to be to just stick a big boiler in the basement or somewhere else out of the way, then run hot water lines everywhere. Maybe in part due to the added effort of running 220V lines in a 110V country
When I worked at a water treatment plant, we produced about 160 million gallons/day of water in the summer time, and only about 80 million gallons/day in the winter time. Now ask yourself what water-consuming activities happen in summer that don't happen in winter.
Primarily, lawns. It's lawns. Most of the international difference in water consumption I would chalk up to lawns, given that the US has much larger average lot sizes and a much larger proportion of detached single-family houses (i.e., houses sitting in the middle of a lawn) than European countries have.
Not really just lawns, but irrigation specifically. I know a lot of people in my country that have detached houses with lawns. I know of no one that owns a sprinkler system. Dry years the lawn just goes a bit brown and no-one cares.
Everyone has a hose, they wash their car and water their flowers by hand.
One thing that shocks me as an immigrant from Europe to the US is toilets. I have not seen a single one that has the two buttons, one for pee and one for the other stuff.
Every time I use the toilet it uses 1.6 gallons. 6 liters...
I think in my home country more than 90% of home toilets are the "low water usage one" (with 3 and 6 liters buttons)
And that's only the start, I noticed that people just don't care about water usage over here. People take water from wells with little oversight. In my home country you need a vast amount of bureaucracy to be allowed to take water from aquifers
The toilet flushing thing is performative. Even if toilet water usage were enough to be worth caring about, dual flush toilets use more water over the lifetime of the toilet, because the more complex designs have a higher failure rate: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/29/dual-flu...
Also, in about half of the country, aquifers replenish as fast as they are used, so there's no point in regulating their use. The largest concern is usually whether or not the well is contaminated.
Say every single one of the 330 million people in America flushes a toilet five times a day, every day of the year.
That’s still less than a cubic mile of water. Lake Mead, by comparison, has a volume of 7 cubic miles. Every American could go back to using outhouses and the water savings wouldn’t even be noticeable.
People are not very good at visualizing this stuff. The volumes involved are hard to grasp.
Or think of it this way: if you personally saved all that water by using an outhouse, it would amount to less than 300 gallons a month. My water bill doesn’t even show usage at a resolution high enough to see those savings. I’m billed per 1,000 gallons.
If the water company doesn’t care enough to track it and charge me for it, it’s noise.
For what it's worth there are other considerations like wastewater processing capacity, especially when it rains
See e.g. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/whats-new/progr...
https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/shared-sewer-systems-househ...
https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-rctom/submission/the-dirty-t...
EU put forwards some Eco labeling thing in 2013 to encourage toilet manufacturers to get eco certified and people buy the stuff (though it was already common long before 2013)
Regulation can be for the greater good, and in this case it's not even mandatory.
I feel like there's a cultural difference where wastefulness is frowned upon at home but encouraged in the US. Big cars, big trucks(cars), big trucks(lorries), big (green)lawns, big roads, big houses, big servings, drive everywhere, fly everywhere, no trains, no public transport.
Everything is big except infrastructure unrelated to cars. Except for some cool dams built before something shifted.
And as others mentioned, the "water rights" which can be traded(bought up) by some evil megacorp instead of benefiting local farmers and population becaue ownership trumps everything.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32...
Interesting. I feel like the majority of toilets (in my US city) have both buttons and it's been that way for almost a decade.
The only time they don't is when it's a toilet that's over 10 years old.
I could be wrong, especially since I mostly just use my own toilet (has two buttons, is 6 years old) or a urinal.
The two button toilets are around, but I agree that they aren't the standard.
Also, wells are regulated in the US, with the exception of low-producing home wells. Even then, they require permitting (the degree of difficulty depends largely upon the state in question). Larger-producing wells have all kinds of reporting and usage requirements associated with them, and water rights can be the most valuable part of a plot of land.
Water and the control of it is the story of the modern American West. Even today, there are a couple of folks up in a coastal community in my county who are fighting to be able to build single family homes on property they bought decades ago. The issue is, you guessed it, water.
Maybe there are regs on appliances in Europe, or maybe the prices are high enough that the market demands efficient appliances (like gas/petrol). Whenever I stay in an airbnb in europe, whether it is a fancy place or a cheap apartment, all the appliances look similarly small and water efficient. The washing machine, flushing, hot water heaters, etc. can all add up. To wit, there is no uniform water efficiency requirements in the US.
It’s probably the lawns and yards, primarily. Including things like pools: in Arizona there’s about one pool for every 13 people. The US averages much larger lot sizes, and those yards consume water.
I’m not saying the US isn’t profligate in other areas like appliances or taking longer showers, but in most the country there’s so much land, such cheap water and very little regulation preventing you from using however much water that you want. Some of the land even comes with a guaranteed quantity of water for irrigation guaranteed, at little to no cost.
I recently looked up whether it would be worth it to me to install a water meter instead of paying a flat-rate. Apparently the flat rate is calculated on a consumption of avout half a cubic meter per day. But, without a water meter, I can only guess if my consumption is more or less than that. My guess is that it's considerably less though.
I live in California, where half of the state is a desert half is a rainforest. The politicians here like to think that everyone lives in urban desert cities built on fault lines next to pyrophytic forests, so our regulations assume that every household needs earthquake proofing, fire proofing, thick insulation, and major urban planning.
I live in an area where pretty much non of those things matter, but one of the regulations that stands out the most is that the water everywhere has to be metered, even though the reserviour near me regularly has to be drained, because it's to full to make it through the wet season.
My water districts solution was to set the price per unit of water at cost, so I pay $40/mo for insfrastructure, and a dollar or two for water. If I quadrupled my water consumption, I wouldn't even notice the price change. I actually pay more to service the meters than I pay for water.
A pretty common stat is that the us is ~5% of the world’s population and uses up ~95% of the world’s resources that are used annually.
In terms of energy use it's more like 4% of the population uses 16% of the resources. Still 4 to 1, but not 19 to 1.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87
Per capita, that rate puts the US in 10th place.
That can't possibly be true. Yeah the US is inefficient but there's no way Europe + Japan + China collectively use only 5% of the world's resources.
What they are calling “per capita domestic water use” is the per capita public+self supplied, which is not the same as home use. They sort of hand-wave over “most of this is used at home” but really it is inclusive of not only lawns (which are bigger in the US) but commercial use of water as well- commercial landscaping (far more in the US than in Europe) and other business use
Plumbing fixtures are also more regulated in the EU but I suspect this is a small portion relative to landscaping.