Student groups raise questions about water consumption

Global Water Brigades member Valerie Richards said celebrating World Water Day at Boston University can inform students about the scarcity and consumption of water, among other issues people may not know about.

“World Water Day . . . lets people know that there is more going on in the world,” Richards, a College of Engineering sophomore, said in an email interview. “It will also make people realize how good we have it in the U.S.”

Student groups organized educational and outreach activities for students on Wednesday and Thursday, Richard said.

The Environmental Student Organization and GWB will host information tables in the George Sherman Union on Wednesday. The ESO plan to hold a water panel discussion called “Water Development in the Twenty-First Century, A Global View” Thursday at 7 p.m., which will feature three BU professors.

“Basically we are doing the same things as ESO,” Richards said. “ I think the main difference is . . . promoting water safety.”

Sustainability@BU intern Patrick Pease, a graduate student in the College of Engineering, noted the importance of issues related to water, since it is limited.

Sustainability set plans to hold its annual shorter shower challenge in April as a part of its Join the Challenge campaign.

Pease said Sustainability eliminated trays in dining halls throughout campus in 2009 because excessive water was needed to clean them.

“Water conservation is one of the most vital issues the world faces today,” said College of Arts and Sciences senior Meredith Withelder, strategic planning intern at Sustainability, in a phone interview.

Sustainability Director Dennis Carlberg said the organization is looking into new technology that will help decrease students’ environmental impact.

“What’s critical is to do everything we can to reduce our environmental footprint,” Carlberg said in a phone interview. “The real message is we all need to reduce our individual impact and when we do that, when we total it all up, we can make a big, big impact.”

While the 2011 campus water consumption amount is not yet available, 2010 was the first year since at least 2005 that the amount increased, according to Sustainability’s website.

Carlberg said he did not know the specific cause, but said the addition of Student Village II may have contributed to the increase.

“I haven’t looked at the source of increase, but I suspect [it contributed],” he said. “We do have more people using showers and flushing toilets and [doing] laundry and everything else.”

Nathan Phillips, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, said students can reduce their personal water consumption by decreasing time spent in the shower.

“Maybe instead of showering every single day, it’s every other day,” Phillips said. “Maybe instead, try to make a four-minute shower instead of an eight-minute shower or treat yourself . . . having the extended, soaking shower and then trying to curb that the other times.

Phillips said Americans could get by on much less water on a daily basis. He tried living on five gallons of water for a day for an experiment, which includes drinking, showering and flushing toilets.

“We’re not efficient, and right now we can get away with it because we do have a relative abundance of rain fall,” he said. “If we don’t get efficient about it and the climate changes and there’s a water deficit in the future, that’s a problem.

“That might add 10 to 15 minutes to your day to be really efficient about your shower instead of just running it and just kind of wasting it,” he said. “If you think about how much we could save . . . and this is all degrading fresh water, we’re basically polluting it when we take a shower or flush a toilet when we drain it down the seat.”