Every March 22 the World Water Day is held, ever since in 1993 the General Assembly of the UN voted that, at least one day a year, the world should take a few minutes to think about the importance of looking after a resource so vital to life and yet so limited as water. For, although the Earth is 95% water -which is why it is called the Blue planet and the Water planet - liquid fresh water, which is what we need to live, accounts for a mere 1% of the total, a paltry amount for a world population that never ceases to grow.

The Spanish can consider themselves a privileged people, especially when compared with the 1,200 million people who have no supply of drinking water. However, in Spain water is still a scarce commodity, something which the abundant rain in recent years seems to have caused everyone to forget, if the survey carried out last December by the Ministry of the Environment is anything to go by, which reported that only 9% of the Spanish make any effort to save water.

And that is in spite of the fact that not so very long ago, in 1995, 11 million people in Spain suffered daily water rationing. And for some time now it has rained very little. In some areas scarcely a drop of rain has fallen since last April and, unless things change, sooner or later we will be suffering from another drought. This is the less attractive side of a Mediterranean country like Spain, which tends to be more often drenched in sun than water, and whose average annual rainfall of just 624 mm makes it the driest country in the European Union. Though it has to be said that with its one thousand plus reservoirs, it also ranks third in the world as far as the number of dams and reservoirs per inhabitant is concerned, but what use are reservoirs if there is no rain to replace the water we take from them?

The situation could be sustainable if it were not for the fact that we waste our water resources. According to the European Environment Agency, Mediterranean countries are the most profligate consumers of water of the European Union, because among other reasons, they insist on maintaining irrigation farming which should really be left to countries with more water. Nearly 80 % of all the water we have in Spain is soaked up by agriculture, which wastes as much as 50 % of the water , due to the bad state of the pipes among other things.

But we also waste water at home without a second thought. Although domestic consumption of water accounts for little more than 10 % of the water used in Spain, since the National Institute of Statistics began keeping its Statistics on Water in 1996, the consumption of water in the home has climbed steadily, from 146 litres per inhabitant per day in 1996, to 165 in 1999, the last year for which figures are available. And that is a lot of water, especially when 50 litres is reckoned to be more than enough to meet the basic needs of our homes and ourselves.

The fact is that we waste huge amounts of water in our homes. Three examples: a tap dripping at a rate of ten drops per minute wastes 2,000 litres of water a year, flushing the toilet unnecessarily means another 10 litres down the pan and leaving the tap on while we brush our teeth sends another 19 litres of unused water down the drain.

If we all took just a little care we could save thousands of millions of litres al year. This has been proved by the action taken in two Spanish cities, Zaragoza and Alcobendas (Madrid), which finally tired of waiting for it to rain and decided to do something about saving water. In Zaragoza, the Foundation for Ecology and Development started a campaign Zaragoza, a water saving city, which ran from February 1997 to January 1999. In one year the city managed to save 1,176 million litres, 5.6% of the city�s annual domestic consumption. How did they manage it? By adopting a series of best practices in the home and in the city, and by installing water saving devices.

Shortly afterwards the campaign City of Water for the 21st Century, promoted by WWF/Adena, in the city of Alcobendas (Madrid), achieved a saving of water equivalent to 16 Olympic size swimming pools in one year and made water saving devices available in shops and stores to all the town�s inhabitants. In September 2001 Alcobendas town hall also passed a bye-law obliging builders to install water saving devices in the taps, cisterns and showers of all new housing. But even without this type of devices it is possible to save water. The installation of individual water meters in apartment buildings will not in itself save water since they only measure consumption, but it will mean that the cost is shared out according to the real consumption of each householder, and it will also make users change their habits when they are aware of and responsible for the outlay.

A major proportion of household water consumption (between 14% and 16 %) is down to household appliances. Nowadays there are ecological models which can make important savings of energy and water. Although it is hard to find washing machines and dishwashers with an ecolabel, you should look at appliances water and energy consumption before deciding which one to buy. For a washing machine to be ecological it shouldn�t consume more than 15 litres of water per kg. of clothes in a normal cotton wash cycle at 60� C. For dishwashers the limit is 1.85 litres of water per place setting for normal models and 2. 25 litres for those for fewer than 10 place settings. However, still the best way to save water these days is by getting into some good habits when it comes to using it. Here is a reminder of what you should be doing.

How to save water in the kitchen
- Wait till you have a full load before you use the dishwasher. Washing the dishes by hand with hot water can work out up to 60% more expensive than using a modern dishwasher on full load, and, what�s more, a dishwasher is kinder to your hands. But if you do wash the dishes by hand, and you have a double sink, use both: one filled with soapy water for washing and the other filled with clean water for rinsing, as rinsing under the tap wastes about 40 litres of water. And do it right after eating, before the food left on the plates has time to dry.
-Don�t defrost food by holding it under a hot tap and use a bowl to wash fresh food in. When you want a drink of water don�t let the tap run until it comes out cold; keep a bottle of cold water in the fridge instead.
- When cooking, use only enough water to cover the food, use the right size pans and lids which fit snugly, so you won�t lose water into the air.

How to save water in the bathroom:
- Turn off the tap when you don�t need water. If you just wet and rinse your toothbrush under the tap and use glass of water to rinse your mouth out, you will use just one litre of water, but if you leave the water running while you brush your teeth it will be more like 20 litres. As shaving takes longer than brushing your teeth, it also wastes more water, as much as 50 litres if you do it without turning off the tap. Instead you should just fill the basin.
- Showering is always better than having a bath. As well as being more hygienic, it uses a third as much water and energy. Try to spend as little time under the shower as possible -five minutes should be enough- and try to remember to turn off the tap while you�re soaping yourself. You can regulate the temperature of the water better with single lever mixer taps, which can give a 50 % saving in consumption and, what�s more, they don�t drip.
- A third of the water we use at home literally goes straight down the toilet. What can you do to prevent this? Don�t use the toilet as if it were a waste bin, that way you won�t have to flush it so often and you�ll make less work for your city�s waste water plant. Fill a bottle with water and place it in the cistern, making sure that it doesn�t get in the way of the mechanism. Now each time you flush the toilet you�ll be saving the volume of water in the bottle. But ideally you should fit a cistern with flush limiting device or, better still, a dual flush cistern, which allows you to choose between a three or six litre flush, instead of the old style nine litre flush.

How top save water when you wash the car:
- Don�t wash the car every week, once a month should be enough.
- Washing the car with a 50 litre bucket of water and a cloth will use ten times less water than if you use a hose. But the best option is to take it to an automatic car-wash, which uses just 20 to 25 litres.
How to save water with the washing machine:
- Always wait till you have a full load before you use the washing machine since it uses practically the same amount of water and electricity whether it�s half empty or full. Although some machines have economy or half-load programmes which use less than a full cycle, two half-load washes will always use more electricity and water than one with a full load.

DID YOU KNOW...?
- According to the latest annual report to come from the Washington Worldwatch Institute (Vital Signs 2001), more than half of the 6,000 million people who inhabit the Earth have no access to sanitation services and 1,200 do not even have access to drinking water. A very high percentage of disease in poor countries is caused by polluted water.

- 22,771 Hm3 of water were consumed in Spain in 1999, of which 17,681 Hm3 (nearly 80 %) went on agriculture, 1,554 Hm3 (almost 7 %) was used by industry, while urban water supply, that is, water consumed by households, companies and municipal services in Spain's towns and cities, accounted for 3,536 Hm3 (15.5%).
Families accounted for 2,368 Hm3 of all the urban water supply. Meanwhile 5,479 Hm3, or 19.4% of all available water, was lost in the distribution networks (National Statistics Institute, Spain in figures 2001).

- Flushing the toilet is the household activity which consumes by far the most water, much more than the shower or the bath (20-32 %) or the washing machine and dishwasher (14-16%). And as strange as it may seem, what we least use water for, a mere 3%, is for drinking and cooking (European Environment Agency 2001, Sustainable water use in Europe. Part 2: Demand management).

- In Spain there are more than 1,000 reservoirs capable of storing 53,191 Hm3. In mid February, these reservoirs held 28,989 Hm3 of water , just 54.5% of their total capacity. Last year, at the same time of year, the reservoirs in Spain were at 72.71% of their capacity (General Directorate of Hydraulic Works and Quality of Water, Hydrological Bulletin).

- If you are interested in finding out what water saving devices are available to fit to the cisterns and taps in your home, or you want to know which are the most efficient taps and cisterns on the market, take a look at the Foundation for Ecology and Development�s web page: http://www.ecodes.org/efcienciagua/index.htm

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