Jamie Phillips

This week I focused my ecochallenge on my water usage. Living in a one bedroom apartment, there’s not a lot of places for me to use water besides my sink and shower. I already know the old rules of turning off the water when you’re brushing your teeth, washing your face, etc. But I have never put much thought into the amount of water I’m wasting while showering. There were two easy switches I knew I could make, putting a bucket on one end of my shower to catch some of theater and using it to water my plants around the house. This ended up woking out really great and I didn’t have to use my sink at all to water plans this week! I also decided to time my showers. I honestly had no clue how long my average showers lasted, its not something I really ever thought about. I was relieved that my normal showering habits weren’t too terrible, my longest shower was right around the 12 minute mark ad it was the day I washed my hair, but the rest fell closer to 5-8 minutes. This week I was just trying to track my current habits and I’m going to be focusing my next weeks eco challenge on setting a timer to have shorter showers. Below are the screenshots of each shower length!

This week I focused on water!
While I almost always use a reusable water bottle, I made sure to only use that this week, I left an empty water bottle in my car in case I forgot mine when leaving my house which is when I'll often end up buying one. I have had a little drip in my kitchen faucet for quite sometime now and honestly have never thought much of it. However, after reading through some of the eco-challenges I realized this was a huge waste of water over time. I called my maintenance and they sent someone up to fix it! I also started showering with a plastic bin in my shower. I've heard of people doing this to collect extra water to water plants. I didn't expect to collect as much water as I did, which was great for my plants! It also made me realize how even just standing in the shower a minute extra wastes a huge amount of water.

For this weeks Eco-challenge I committed to signing at least 3 petitions that were in support of/protecting the environment. I went through the Environmental Justice Foundation who had quite a few to choose from- I selected the first few I saw that I felt specifically compelled to. The website was so informative and gave information about each petition and had links for even more information and tangible statistics which was so helpful. I also really liked that you can sign up to receive emails about more petitions. In very early Covid times I was in the habit of reading and signing petitions that aligned with my views, however, I've fallen out of this practice and completely forgot about it! The three I selected: supporting legislation to protect the ocean (maintaining healthy reefs, whale hunting, etc), shutting down commercial wildlife markets (for ethical, and health safety reasons- preventing zoonotic from emerging and spreading), and protection/aide to refugees that have become displaced due to climate disasters.
I get pretty overwhelmed when thinking about the changes I can make, and I often feel really helpless- I'm not really sure where to start. There are just so many issues that our climate is facing. But, these petitions left me feeling more informed and like I at least helped to achieving a larger goal- even in such a small way. Also, this is something that is sustainable to continue doing- researching, reading and signing these petitions only took 30 minutes of my week. That is something I could easily, and plan to, continue doing every week!