Residential Water Usage Facts
- The average toilet uses 5 to 7 gallons of water per flush.
- A shower can use 25 to 50 gallons of water (5 gallons per minute).
- The average bath takes about 36 gallons of water.
- About 340 billion gallons of water are used every day in the United States. This total includes water used in irrigation, in industry, in fire fighting and in street cleaning.
- It takes about 1 gallon of water to process a quarter pound of hamburger.
- It takes 39,000 gallons of water to manufacture a new car, including tires.
- It takes about 800,000 gallons of water to grow an acre of cotton.
- Ten gallons of water are needed to refine one gallon of gasoline.
- An egg is about 74 percent water.
- A watermelon is about 92 percent water.
- The water we use today is the same water the dinosaurs used.
- The Earth's oceans cover about 140,500,000 square miles and contain almost 330,000,000 cubic miles of water.
- Cutting one minute off your shower time can save about 700 gallons of water per month.
- Fresh, incompact snow is usually 90-95 percent trapped air.
- Humans require about 2 1/2 quarts of water a day.
- More than 1.5 billion people do not have access to a safe and adequate water supply.
- The average American individual uses 100 to 176 gallons of water at home each day.
- There are more than 55,000 community water systems in the United States, processing nearly 34 billion gallons of water per day.
- 47 percent of the US population uses surface water; 53 percent of the US population uses groundwater.
- The distribution network for large water systems in the U.S. comprises about 600,000 miles of pipes.
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