Two birds with one soap: How to fight COVID-19 and build good water-saving habits

Guest blog by Allen Townsend, Brendan Markey-Towler & John Pickering

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We’ve been talking about handwashing A LOT lately.

Handwashing is one of the first lines of defense against contracting COVID-19 and protecting our loved ones, friends and colleagues. To help ensure that everyone has water for handwashing, many U.S. cities and states are suspending their water shutoff policies for residents who can’t pay their bills. 

In light of World Water Day this past week, this intense push for increased handwashing caused us to wonder, “might we be throwing water sustainability to the winds?”

While recognizing that industrial and commercial users are using less water during this time, Kevin Enfinger at ADS Environmental Services (a sewer flow monitoring company), suggests that, particularly in residential service areas, we may observe increases in water usage.

Sewer flow pattern from a residential area in California
Original Figure Credit: Kevin Enfinger at ADS Environmental Services

Take the San Antonio Water System (SAWS) for example, which has made remarkable steps to conserve water and is regarded by many water experts as the gold standard utility for water conservation in the U.S. Suppose that all 1.8 million SAWS customers move from an average 6 seconds per handwash to 20 seconds. At 5 handwashes per day, some “back of the napkin” math estimates a potential increase of 3 million gallons per day (MGD) in water usage from handwashing.

If we also assume that everyone is also washing their hands an additional three times a day – from 5 handwashes per day to 8 – water demand from handwashing could increase water use by more than 6 MGD for SAWS.

For communities around the world – like San Antonio – that currently face extreme drought, these complex potential implications for human health, the environment, and the economy must be considered.

Behavioral science squares the circle

So, are we doomed to either fight COVID-19 or conserve water, but not both?

Not necessarily. Behavioral science can “square” this circle and turn the present crisis into an opportunity to build good water saving habits. If you consult, for instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, you can see that they do not necessitate the use of a huge amount of water. Indeed, the well-known “20 second/two happy birthdays” rule applies to soaping your hands up while the tap is turned off. You only need to use water to rinse the soap off once it’s done its job.

But how many of us have the bad habit of leaving the tap running while we soap our hands? We all know that habits form by repetition, repetition and more repetition, and we know that we’re going to have to wash our hands a lot during this crisis (let’s be honest – more than most of us usually would).

So, we have an excellent opportunity to kill two birds with ‘one soap’.

We know a fair bit about how habits form in behavioral science, so we can apply this knowledge to the task. It’s more complex than we might think at first glance (Wendy Wood provides a good introduction with her book Good Habits, Bad Habits). But it’s very doable.

Behavioral science of water-saving habits

“White knuckling” – trying to form a good habit out of sheer force of will – is neither necessary, nor particularly effective. It’s often too hard for our limited willpower, especially under stressful conditions like those we are living through. It’s smarter to structure the environment so that it compels the formation of the habit; it makes it easier.

In this case, you can structure your handwashing environment to make it easier to soap-up first and only then rinse with water. The more you do that, the more the habit begins to form and “bed down” into your subconscious mind.

Conversely, you can structure your environment so that it’s ever-so-slightly harder to turn the water on and leave it on. The less you do that, the more the anti-habitual routines in your mind begin to break down, allowing the habit to take hold.

Exactly how to do that most effectively varies from person to person, so you should experiment and tinker with your hand-washing environment yourself. But it comes down to a simple principle: how can I make it easier to soap first, rinse later, and just a little bit harder to leave the tap running? By way of example, you could think about moving the soap a little further from the tap, just enough that you must make a deliberate movement from the soap to access it.

All this experimenting with your handwashing environment increases the chances you will engage in the repetition, repetition that makes water-conservation more habitual and beds the routine down into the subconscious.

An opportunity to build water-smart lifestyles?

What’s even better is: why stop with handwashing? Since COVID-19 has us all washing our hands more, and since we can use this as an opportunity to build good water-saving habits, we can even begin to extend our habit-building strategies to the rest of our lives. Start thinking about ways you can structure your showering environment to build good habits around soaping up first then rinsing. Start thinking about ways you can structure your dishwashing environment so that you only use water to rinse the dishes. Start thinking about how you might structure your garden watering environment differently. And so on.

The old saying is: never let a good crisis go to waste. In this sense, this present one is no different. A crisis that requires us to wash our hands more can, with a bit of behavioral science, be turned into an opportunity to build habits that underlie more water-sustainable lifestyles.

Allen Townsend is a Ph.D. fellow in the Behavioral Science for Sustainable Systems program at the Convergent Behavioral Science Initiative at the University of Virginia. He researches scaling-up behavior change programs and organizational sustainability. He has expertise in water sustainability, environmental engineering and public affairs.

Brendan Markey-Towler is a Senior Advisor at Evidn. He is a behavioral, institutional and evolutionary economist who is responsible for contributing to Evidn’s research and strategic business development. He has experience and expertise in applied behavioral and systems science research, education and communication.

John Pickering is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the Evidn Group (USA and Australia). He is a behavioural scientist that specialises in the analysis and modification of human behavior at a population-level. He has expertise in systems-level thinking, behavior change implementation, psychological theories, and enjoys engaging with communities to create wide-scale change.