water, water everywhere

happy new year, my green friends! i hope your first day of 2008 is treating you right and that you're enjoying the nice fresh start. i'd love to hear your going green goals for the new year. what are you thinking about?

this year, i'm looking forward to continued learning and experimenting with ways to help slow things down. to kick it off this week, i'm thinking about water.

for starters, i'm trying to find out what the environmental impact is per gallon of water that i use. i'm not finding a nice tidy breakdown on the impact of my water use, so if you have any research suggestions along these lines, please send them my way. i did find this interesting regional comparison of consumptive use vs. renewable water supply, but it's from 2000, so i suspect things have changed since then.

on the home front, i took a careful look at our water bill last month and started getting interested in how many gallons of water we use. it will be fun to make some changes over the next month and see if we can reduce the amount of water (and $$) we churn through. here's a list of the things i'm going to try:

> install energy-efficient shower and faucet heads or make sure the washers are tight
> find and repair water leaks. This cool link shows you how to determine if you have water leaks and tells you how to fix them.
> stop buying bottled water and use my fancy new SIGG bottle instead (apparently each plastic bottle of water takes about 6.7 bottles of water to produce. yikes. . .)
> turn off water while bushing or shaving
> run full loads in the dish and clothes washer
> fill a plastic bottle with water, recap it, and place it in the toilet tank. you’ll reduce the flow by 40 percent and still maintain enough water for a good flush.

we rent our house, so the following suggestions don't make sense for us, but i'd be interested to hear if any of you homeowners out there have tried them out:

> install low flow or composting toilets
> install low flow and washerless faucets
> rearrange plumbing so rainwater and gray water can be used to flush the toilet
> install an activated charcoal or ceramic filter for drinking water

any other water conservation ideas to add to this list?

last but not least, cheers!