Devices and habits to reduce water consumption
Source: BBVA. Sustainability : 17-09-2026
Translated from spanish by Revista Ariel.
The incorporation of sustainable habits into daily routines and the adoption of measures to make water efficient help to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) and favor the environment. BBVA has prepared a monograph that will serve as a guide to become aware of the impact we have on the planet and the importance of taking action to promote sustainability.
The week begins. You wake up and the first thing you think about is everything you have to do. While you organize your ideas and mentally organize all your tasks, you go to the bathroom, flush the toilet and wash your hands. You have already used the first 20 liters of water that are used every time we use the toilet, something that in more than half of the world there is no access to. 1 in 4 people do not have drinking water, around 2,000 million people, and almost twice as many do not have sanitation services safely.
Did you know that the toilet is responsible for 21% of domestic water consumption? With a double flush or interrupt system in cisterns, you can save up to 60%, and more if we do not turn it into a wastebasket. Another alternative is to store the water that comes out of the shower until it comes out hot and use it here. In countries such as Spain, an average of 133 litres of water are consumed per day. Many more than the 90 recommended daily litres for efficient consumption.
The main uses of water and why it is key to take care of water resources
After taking away litres to reach this figure, while thinking about answering a couple of emails, looking at new WhatsApps and reading the news, you refresh your face. These actions, which may be so common, are not so for about 29% of the world's population, who do not have basic facilities to wash their hands with soap and water at home. These data are at risk of increasing due to climate change. As explained by the expert of this resource Elena López Gunn – who is also one of the authors of the IPCC report and CEO of ICATLIST – all the impacts of the current climate emergency are related to water: droughts, floods, heat waves... To adapt to these phenomena, and even mitigate them, she adds that public-private partnerships are crucial. But we can also do a lot individually.
By washing our hands, face, teeth, showering or scrubbing, we can reduce the cost of this resource by up to 50%. How? With water-saving devices in taps and showers. They are affordable and, in addition to using less water, allow savings on the bill. Everything that involves opening a tap accounts for more than half of the total water consumed in the home.
In this sense, the Community #PorElClima, the initiative that promotes climate action in the different sectors of society, recommends these devices to reduce water:
- Flow reducers. They are installed in the pipes of showers or washbasins. This mechanism makes it possible to set the consumption and go from 15 litres per minute to 8 litres in the taps, and from 20 to 10 litres per minute in a shower.
- Aerators on taps, which allow savings in consumption of up to 40%
- Thermostatic taps. They save five litres of water to achieve the right temperature.
With all this information and applying some of these solutions, you are already on the path to change. But you can still do more! With the decision to shower instead of bathe, we consume up to five times less water and energy. It is recommended to take a maximum of 5 minutes. In this time we require 100 litres, 50 if we use a flow reducer, much less than half of what a bath entails. This, added to turning off the tap when we soap up, translates into a saving of more than 70,000 litres of water per year. A practice that we should also use when brushing our teeth: we gain another 6 litres of water per minute if we turn off the tap until we rinse out.
Education, learning and dissemination are key in this whole process of changing habits. Campaigns such as those promoted by the company in charge of providing water and sewerage services for the City of Buenos Aires, AySA, with 'The good of water arrives' or 'Activate!', aim to raise awareness among citizens and generate a change in habits. Within the framework of the project 'Water unites us', the public-private partnership of Suizagua Chile leads the efficient use of water by working with different communities in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Chile. There, universities, companies and the Government itself are working on innovative solutions to combat the water crisis they are going through with the Engineering Without Borders Chile Foundation (ISF).
In Spain, the educational and environmental awareness project developed by FACSA, through pedagogical innovation, also teaches the importance of making responsible use of water.
This sacred dimension of this resource, which in many religions means liberation, purification and abundance, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry reflected through the lines of 'The Little Prince' describing water as an essential and necessary good.
Have you heard of Turkmenistan, in Central Asia? It is the country where the most water is extracted per inhabitant. It is followed by Iraq and Chile. This figure is obtained from the rate of water extracted from agriculture, industry and municipal consumption. More than 70% of its use is for agriculture. Citizen participation to cut this expenditure is also important. Measures such as those proposed by different projects of the WWF organization favor "the water of the future".
While you think about and integrate new practices to those you already applied, the alarm on your mobile phone, the watch or your intuition, tell you that the five minutes recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) and different dermatologists so as not to waste water or dehydrate our skin have already passed.
After drying off, you look at the weather and choose what you are going to wear. Changing the way you consume it also extends to the choice of clothes. Exchanging them with your people if they can still be worn and buy less, but of higher quality and, above all, sustainable, is key for the planet. The textile sector is responsible for approximately 20% of the world's drinking water pollution. The EU estimates that making a cotton T-shirt requires 2,700 litres of water, the same amount that a person drinks in two and a half years.
