You have used water for various reasons in the past. Be it taking a bath or washing your clothes, car or even your house. Then, you have used water for other purposes like cooking, drinking among others, but how much do you know about water. Well, there are some facts that can easily shock you about water.
Of course, that you use water on almost a daily basis you’d expect to know everything about it, but there are things you don’t. For example, do you have any idea how much free water is trapped in glaciers? You have to agree that you don’t know much about water than you initially thought you do.
To find out more about water, and about some of the facts about it that you probably didn’t know about before, you should read on. Info on how much of the freshwater is held up in the ground can also be found here. You can also find out how much water is unusable because it is frozen.
How Much Water The US Uses
The first question before you get to anything that water consists of and where you can find it is, just how much water do you use. Of course, it’s quite impossible to quantify especially if you look at it on a daily basis. And remember that’s just you alone, or you and your family.
How about how much water does the U.S as a whole use per day. Now that’s a far-reaching question considering the population and the number of factories being operated in the US per day. However, it is rumored that per day, the US alone, among all other countries in the world, uses approximately 400 billion gallons of water.
That doesn’t take into account that around 36 million gallons of water in the US is wasted annually through the New York water supply alone.
How Many Gallons are Required to Grow Food for a Family
That, you would assume it’s a family of four people, that’s the father, mother, and two children, as that is the norm for most families today. The number here is about just how many gallons of water you can use to feed such a family for a day.
For that family, assuming that they are all healthy, would require at least 6800 gallons of water to feed them in a day. And to think that a number of families all across the world are suffering from lack of water in their environments. The figure stands at around 780 million people not having access to an improved water source.
And to think that around 200 children die every hour due to unsafe water, other places use at least 20 gallons of water to create a pint of beer.
70% of the World is Water
Did you know that a huge part of the world is covered by water bodies? Well, you wouldn’t even have a clue of that by simply just looking at it with ‘naked eyes’. The world as a whole looks so big to imagine that a huge part of the world is just water.
Of course, the land looks much bigger considering that there are around 7 billion people across the world and not many of them live out in the water full time. But when you travel by air or sea is when you can come to the realization that the world is pretty much a water body than anything else.
On the other hand, that water, at least most of it isn’t freshwater as NASA estimates that around 97% of the global water is salty. They, at NASA, also estimate that only 0.03 percent of the water comes from lakes, rivers, etc. and the rest of the water on earth is trapped in glaciers while others are also trapped in the ground.
How Much Water a Toilet Can Waste
One of the crucial parts that water plays in our day to day lives is the use of it in the toilet. In fact, if there was no need for toilet use, a lot of water would be conserved. Well, if you never thought of it, a toilet can waste up to 200 gallons of water per day.
That’s the waste that an average toilet can, you still haven’t factored in the amount a toilet actually uses. A normal running toilet can use up to 500 or more gallons of water for an average household. If it’s for a huge number of users then the number can go upwards of around 1000 gallons plus, that’s in a single day.
This, however, doesn’t take into account the economic implications for poor sanitization. It is estimated that poor sanitization or the lack of it all together can see losses of up to $260 billion on an annual basis. So, the lack of proper sanitization is much deadly as the amount of water that is wasted on toilets.
Human Body and Water
The average human body is majorly made up of water with other parts consisting of structures such as bones and skin. In fact, the human body is around 50 -65% water. The average for a baby can go even higher with scientist saying that a newborn baby’s body is around 78 percent water
That simply means that even without the 2 liters of water that most doctors recommend, your body is still pretty much water. And there is no one who is actually watery as many would like to assume. As no singular human body across the world can be more than the scientifically proven 65% of water.
This also brings about the rough idea that most of the illnesses that happen across the world are water-related. That’s around 80% if you want to narrow it down to a number. This is because a human being is what he/she eats.
Foods are planted with water, animals that are eaten also consume water, and so on. And lastly, as part of the human body’s relation with water, around 80% of the human brain is water - or better yet filled by it.
How Much Water Swimming Pool Loses
You have definitely come across a number of pools during your short or long stay in the world. But how much water do these pools lose in a day? Forget how much they lose when people are swimming playing around water, how much do pools actually lose through evaporation?
Well, an estimate shows that around 1000 gallons of swimming pool water is lost due to evaporation per month. That’s for every swimming pool that you see all around. That’s roughly around 3800 liters of water that is lost by swimming pools.
Now, if they say that if every person in the US would save at least one flush of their toilet in a day, that would save a mile-long river of water. What if all the swimming pool owners among other facilities would save the water in their pools for one month, how much water would be saved?
A Bath or Shower
Another question you would do well to get answered is should you use a bath tab or should you just use the shower? Which one of the two can you use to save more water? How much does each one of them use per day or every time you take a bath/shower?
When you take a bath, that’s assuming you’re using a bath tab, that will average your use of water to around 70 gallons per bath. That’s on the high side because the average body doesn’t need to use that much water to be cleaned. If you take into account that spending at least 5 minutes in the shower consumes less water.
In fact, if you have a 5-minute shower, you will averagely spend at least 10 - 25 gallons of water. See, if you take a 5-minute shower, you will save at least 50 gallons of water per shower that you take, as opposed to when you fill that tab.
Conclusion
Water is said to be a huge part of life on earth. And to think that there are millions of gallons of water that are wasted across the globe on a daily basis while others have no access. It shows you that you have no idea of all there is to know about water while you use it on a daily basis. Here are a few curiosities about water that you wouldn’t believe exist in this world.
