European School Partnership for Sustainability (ESPS)
Use of water in our school
The ecological footprint is affected by many factors, as transportation, food, energy etc. Our aim is to examine the contribution of water consumption in our schools ecological footprint. To reach our aims we put some simple questions.
- Where and how do we use water?
- Why do we use water at school?
- Could we reduce the amount of water that we use? What?s the difference with last year?s measurements?
Firstly, we consume water at outside taps, where students can quench their thirst. Sometimes taps are licking water and they need to be fixed. It might seem a minor consequence, but at the end of the day we end up with a large amount of wasted drinkable water in litres. In order to reduce the amount of water wasted, we should change the tap system entirely, replacing the existing ones with taps that use buttons instead of levers.
Secondly, water is also used in flushing toilets. We don?t own an eco-friendly cistern system, so even if we don?t need all the water that?s in the container, it is still going to be all emptied. Also, what we could use isa robust polyethylene bag, which is sat at the bottom of the cistern. When the toilet is flushed, up to 3 liters of water is held in the bag. The fact that we do not own such a system costs us a lot of water that could be used in other ways.
According to our recent studies, we found out that during the period of 40 weeks we consumed around 229.000 lit. That shows us that approximately every student used 729,3 lit every year. While that number is not huge, it could be reduced. That?s what we aimed for 2014.
When we got the results we were pleasantly surprised. During the same period of time (40 weeks) our school used around 180.000 lit. That brings us to the conclusion that we reduced our ?energy footprint? as regarding water, by (229.000 ? 180.000) 49 thousand (49.000) litres.