Water Efficiency at Home | National Geographic

In the United States, we're facing a national water shortage. Government-backed research shows that in a little over 50 years, half of the freshwater basins may not meet our demands. For this story, I'm in my home state of Florida. Here, the water crisis is real and demanding positive action.

This is Silver Springs. Almost half of Florida's fresh water comes from aquifers like this—natural underground reservoirs that are topped up by rainfall. But earlier this year, wet season rainfall in the south of the state fell by 45%, and the pressure is mounting as Florida's population grows by around 300,000 people a year. Our water situation is unsustainable.

I've come to Naples Botanical Garden, a leader in best practices for conserving water and horticulture. If I understand correctly, up to half of Florida's residential water goes back into irrigating our gardens. What can we do to make that more efficient?

We have about six months out of the year where we have an abundance of rainfall and six months where we have drought conditions. Being a botanical garden, we really focus on selecting plants that can take those cycles of drought. If you do that, we can really cut down on irrigation. That's really climate-friendly gardening, and we're working with nature.

Is there something we can do at home to collect our water, protect our water, and reuse it?

Yeah, so in my own home, I have rain barrels. When it rains, we collect water, and I use that water to water my garden throughout the dry months of the year. Quite often, we think of the environment as something that's out there; we think of the Everglades. But really, the things that we do in our own homes—our backyard is part of the environment.

But it's not just outside where we can make a difference. On average, American families use more than 300 gallons of water every day, and a lot of that is being wasted. I'd love to see how my family can save water at home.

From dripping toilets to faulty faucets, leaks in our homes can lose nearly a trillion gallons of water every year. Just replacing a 50-cent washer on a faucet can save up to 3,000 gallons of water per year. And many of us still rinse our dirty dishes under a running faucet before loading them into the dishwasher. This is a huge waste of water because you actually need the dishes to be dirty as the enzymes and the detergent latch onto food particles to work effectively.

We have less water than we think, but the minute we realize that every drop is valuable, we begin to change our behavior for the better. Whether that's creating a climate-friendly garden, fixing that leaky faucet, or just not pre-rinsing our dishes, it's these little water-saving measures that can be done by me, in the home, and by all of us across America that can help make a huge difference for future water security.