"Weird" Eco Habits Contest Sneak Peek: Reusing Water
by Sean Fisher, Cincinnati, Ohio on 11.22.05
Last week, we gave you the first sneak peek into our "Weird Eco Habits" contest (be sure to get your entries in by Friday!) by showing you Brad Hole's urban chicken coop in Seattle. For the next sneak peek into our contest, we cross the Pacific and head to Hiroshima, Japan, where TreeHugger Joy Walsh practices her "weird" eco habit - reusing her bath water for laundry water. In Joy's view, "3 rinse cycles of clean water just seems such a waste."
It takes a lot of hard work to transfer water manually from one place to another. Although Joy would love to have a holding tank and plumbing system that would do all of this for her, for the time being she will have to make do with a more, as Joy puts it, "aerobic" process of transferring water: a bucket. She and her son take turns running from bath to laundry - transporting buckets of water, and getting a quick workout in the process. Kudos to Joy for being a resourceful TreeHugger and thanks for letting us know about your "weird" eco habit!
If you have an eco habit your friends or family would think is "weird", let us know about it and you could come away with a great prize package from our friends at Greenloop. All you need to do is email us at: contest [at] treehugger [dot] com - and give us a quick description of what your "weird" eco habit is. However, this Friday, November 25th is the last day to get your entry in, so get to it!
This would seem to only work well in Japan where people wash and rinse themselves before taking a bath. The soapy water found in the typical western bath tub doesn't seem like it would be get for rinsing one's laundry in.
I live in Japan and this is pretty common here for various reasons.
1) people don't put soap in the bathwather, they wash up before getting in the bath.
2) most commercial washing machines come with a tube and a built in pump that can be used to suck up the bath water.If your machine doesn't have one built in you can get one at a local store for about $30.
3) in most houses the washing machine is built near the bath tub making 2) much easier.
I tried using the bathwater for my yard/plants- I still do but not on a regular basis as it is a slight hassle and sometimes I do not have the time (and now it's winter)- the built in pump to syphon out the water mentioned above sounds like a dream! p.s. this kind of tied into the not cutting the grass eco habit- after I bought my house I set out to rid it of most of the grass and create a habitat and a refuge for the little lives around the city- still working but have many trees, shrubs, native plants, etc. and much life now in a previously blah flat lawn.