By Hannah Shairer ‘22
Everybody uses water. It is a factor of our lives that we cannot live without. Have you ever thought about how the places around you use water? For my sustainability project this year, I decided to look into GFA’s water usage. Specifically, I looked into how water is used at GFA, how GFA conserves water, and different ways students and faculty alike can conserve water in their daily lives. I started this project by doing research, as every good project should start with. 
.png)
when a single toilet is leaking or if an automatic toilet is flushing too much. Another thing I learned from Mr. Champagne is that water can be elusive. Water is always right in front of your face but sometimes we don't think about everything because we can't always see it. That was one of the goals of my project, to make some of the invisible visible. I've been grateful to have teachers who are trying to educate us on the “invisible” parts of our daily lives and how we use water in our school but many people that I've talked to haven't done too much digging into GFA’s water usage. Since I'm interested in it, I thought people would benefit from knowing what's happening. So, here I am writing this blog and posting information to our Sustainability Instagram page.
Some things that GFA does to conserve water are related to the restrooms at GFA. Before COVID, there were automatic sinks and manual sinks. Due to the new COVID precautions, GFA had to take out all of the manual sinks and replace them with automatic ones. This created a lot less water waste especially with all the hand-washing this year to keep us all healthy. People were leaving the faucet on and forgetting to turn it off, and, if you can imagine, you're washing your hands and you get some soap and maybe a little water and then you take your hands away from the faucet to scrub them while singing the ABC’s, and then you put them back to the faucet to rinse off the soap. With the manual sinks, it would be on the entire time. The automatic sinks would only be on when you get a little bit of water in the beginning and then when you're rinsing your hands at the end so it would waste a lot less water. Another thing that GFA does to conserve water is that we have low-flow toilets.
Low-flow toilets are just like normal toilets except that they use a lot less water for each flush. At GFA, we use 1 and 1/4 gallon toilets across the school. This is tremendously helpful because,, and this might be a little gross, but when you go to the bathroom you are doing your business in clean, sanitary water, your business doesn’t actually need that much water to flush it down the drain when you go to the bathroom. So by installing low-flow toilets, less water goes down the drain, and it's less detrimental to the environment. Another thing that school is trying to do to reduce water is trying to eliminate trays in the cafeteria. Last year, there was a trayless week in the upper school. This was a week where all the trays in the cafeteria were taken away and students just used plates and other dishes instead of trays. We tried this to see how much water to trays use up, and to see if we can reduce water in the cafeteria without causing too much of a change in students and faculties daily lunch routines. This pilot project turned into (mostly) removing trays for the rest of the year. By doing this, we had a really good indicator that this could work and be a possible way to conserve water at GFA. But, then covid-19 and it's been put on the back burner for a little bit since we aren’t using trays at school this year. But I hope that when we resume lunch in the cafeteria we continue to do so without using trays.
After I did this research about what the school does to conserve water, I reached out to two other members of the sustainability inquiry class that I am in, Annabel Lawton ‘21 and Annika White ‘21. They are doing a project in the greenhouse and in the garden and have been thinking about water usage as well. I asked them a few questions and here are their responses.
Do you know how GFA conserves water?
A few years back, Mr. Champagne took the initiative to have the school toilets switched to low-flow toilets, so that instead of using three gallons of water per flush, they would use only one. The school also tried using waterless urinals a few years back, but it proved inefficient from a technical standpoint. But nonetheless, the fact that GFA's maintenance crew is passionate enough about water conservation to go through the trial and error to make changes wherever they can is something very unique and, in our opinion, what characterizes GFA's sustainability.
Did anything surprise you from either the meeting with Mr. Champagne or someone else you met with during your project?
We were most surprised to see how extensive the school's water report is. Of course any school or building in general must keep data on its water expenditure and the cost to supply, but as two students who had never thought much about this before, we found it fascinating to see how much data analysis must go into running an institution's water supply for efficiency and cost-effectiveness. That really complicated our understanding of how much strategy must go into optimizing the school's water usage to be most sustainable.
Anything else you would like to know about how GFA conserves water?
"It would be really cool to know more about how GFA's proximity to the marsh and the Sound affect the school's water usage. Ms. Roellke told us that the reason we can't have a pool on campus has to do with GFA's ecological position in relation to those habitats, but we're not sure exactly what those regulations are that say so or why they are in place. We're wondering how much the ecosystem around GFA really influences the water we use.“ And I’m interested in how GFA influences the water and ecosystems around us."
.png)
Based on these answers from Annabel and Annika, I knew that my project needed to give the general public some ideas and simple ways of how they could take small steps in conserving water. My project also focused on ways in which everyone at home can help to reduce their own water usage. Some examples that I thought of were to turn the tap off when washing your hands or brushing your teeth, to take shorter showers, use a gray or recycled water or no water waste system if it is accessible to you, Routinely check your sinks and toilets for leaks because leaks are a huge factor and wasting water a lot of people don’t always think some water dripping is a big deal but a bunch of small leaks can add up. By frequently checking for these leaks or having someone monitor your own water bills for your home, it can reduce a lot of your water waste. And if you see something, tell someone that you see it. Don't just leave it there and ignore it, tell someone so they can fix it, and then you are back on track to saving water.
A lot of people that I've talked to say that they don't do this so I challenge you, yes you, if you are in the habit of keeping the water on when you brush your teeth, try turning it off for a week and see if it makes any difference. If it seems like it's the exact same thing, then you're saving water while also not changing your routine too much. Another thing is to simply be aware of the visible and invisible water. All the water in the world isn't just coming out of your sink at home. There is water in your washing machine, in your toilet, in washing cars, watering lawns, but it is also in much less visible places. There was water used to produce our clothes, our plastic bottles, and some forms of electricity. Basically, there's water everywhere so just be mindful of where your water is coming from and how much of it you're using. And finally, if you are interested in finding out a pretty good estimate of how much water your household uses, I highly recommend the water footprint calculator (linked below) to see how much water your household uses! It helped me better understand the average household's water usage and where the visible and invisible water is.