Reusable water bottles are an incredible way to reduce your waste footprint and conserve water! Not only do water bottles reduce waste by keeping single-use water bottles out of landfills, but they also reduce water consumption because they don’t need to be washed as often as dining hall cups or other water cups. Reusable water bottles are also a pretty good place for stickers, just in case you needed another reason to get one!

That’s right, we’re actually encouraging you to put off doing laundry for one more week! Fuller loads of laundry still use around the same amount of water as lighter loads. Thus, by stuffing more clothes into the washer, you actually decrease the amount of water used on each individual piece of clothing. This is good because we generally overwash our clothes in the United States! We’d still encourage you to defer to the smell test if you go too long without doing laundry though! No need to put it off that long.

If you’ve never been a fan of washing dishes by hand, Mines Sustainability has got your back! Washing a “load” of dishes by hand can use up to 7 times more water than some of the most energy-efficient dishwashers on the market. So, if your dishes have been piling up in the sink, know that you can throw them in the dishwasher and walk away knowing you’ve helped conserve water!

As it turns out, putting off chores is an excellent way to conserve water!

Putting frozen foods under hot running water is a fantastic way to waste both energy and clean water! By allowing foods to thaw in the fridge, you can avoid both of these issues! Plan ahead and make sure you cook thoroughly afterward!

‘Thaw for 24 hours. They should have told me that yesterday.’

Whether you forget to drink all of your water or have leftover water from washing fruits, veggies, or rice, feel free to use this water for your houseplants! They need water too, they’re just not quite as picky as you. So, give them a hand and help the environment by letting them sip on your leftovers!

Plants like to savor their water, and this can sometimes lead to a bit of evaporation over the course of a sunny day. So, whether your watering your houseplants or an entire vegetable garden, water plants at night to reduce the amount of water that is evaporated away!

If you find a leaky faucet/sprinkler/pipe on campus, report it to Infrastructure and Operations through their work order form. If you find a leak off-campus, always look for a way to report it to somebody that can fix it! Almost 10% of homes in the US have leaks that can waste 90 gallons or more per day! That’s a ton of water! Let’s save it!

‘I know we asked for a room with running water,but…’

We know that showers are a great time to sit and contemplate life, but this sort of profound thinking is also profoundly wasteful! The average shower uses 2.1 gallons of water per minute, which means that your 10-minute shower uses around 21 gallons of water! If you just contemplate the meaning of life outside the shower, we’re sure you could get that usage down to just 4.2 gallons. Give it a shot!

As winter sets in and our cars become more liable to the muck that snow throws all over the road, consider using commercial car washes instead of your home hose. Commercial car washes use recycled water to reduce their water footprint! They’re also pretty fun to drive through if we’re being honest here.

Modern Brush Car Wash Blue Color Graded Concept.