Most of us have been taught since childhood to be careful in our use of water.  We’ve been encouraged to take shorter showers, not let the water faucet run while brushing our teeth or shaving, or to install water-efficient plumbing fixtures such as low-flow toilets in our homes to conserve water.

Each of these water-saving measures is important, and practicing them should be part of everyone’s water conservation ethic.  Each of these actions will reduce the volume of water that must be withdrawn from natural habitats such as rivers, lakes, and aquifers, leaving more water to support fish and other aquatic life and leaving more water to flow downstream where others can use it.  Water conservation can help cities avoid water shortages, or enable a city’s population to expand without having to further deplete freshwater sources.  By using less water we are also using less energy, because it takes a lot of electricity to pump water from a water source, purify it for our use, distribute it to our homes and businesses, and clean it again after we’ve used it.

It may surprise you, however, to learn that when you look at your use and dependence on water more comprehensively – beyond your use of water inside your home – you will find much bigger ways for you to help conserve our planet’s water supplies.

If you are concerned about water shortages or want to do as much as you can to protect freshwater habitats, you might consider the following 5 ways to substantially lighten your personal water footprint.

1. Reduce Your Outdoor Watering

In many cities, particularly those located in drier regions, an enormous volume of water – in many instances half or more of all water used in cities — goes to watering of lawns, gardens, golf courses, and other landscaped areas.

There are likely many ways that you can reduce your own use of water outdoors, even if you don’t water a lawn or don’t want to rip out your lawn entirely.  You can look for ways to reduce the size of your lawn or any other areas that require irrigation.  And when you do water your lawn, flower beds, or vegetable gardens, you might be able to do so more sparingly. Peter Weeks has put together these excellent suggestions in his Daily Gardener blog.

2. Reduce Your Consumption of Animal Products

In the late 1990s, Tony Allan, a professor at King’s College in London, pointed out that much of our dependence on water is indirect or “virtual water,” meaning that it requires water to produce the food and other goods we consume.  One of Allan’s students, Arjen Hoekstra, pioneered techniques to quantify the virtual water used in growing or manufacturing a product, now known as the “water footprint” of a product.

Hoekstra and his colleagues at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have documented that it takes 50-100 times more water to produce our food than we use in our homes.  In fact, they have estimated that more than 90% of all the water consumptively used by our global population goes to irrigated agriculture. As Arundhati Roy wrote in The God of Small Things, “More rice, at the price of a river.”

Even more astonishing is the fact that more than a quarter of all water consumed in crop production – equaling nearly one-fourth of all water consumptively used in the world – goes into producing animal-based goods such as meat, milk, cheese, eggs, and leather.  This is due to the enormous volumes of water required to grow animal feed such as hay, alfalfa, or corn.

The next time you sit down at your dinner table you might consider that 130 gallons of water are needed to make a salad, but more than 1300 gallons to make a steak. By cutting back on your consumption of animal-based food and other products, you can substantially reduce your personal water footprint and your impacts on the planet.

3. Stop Wasting Food

We all have to eat, so there will be limits to the degree to which we can lighten our water footprints with dietary changes.

But here’s another really big way to shrink the food portion of your water footprint: stop wasting food.   Researchers at the Stockholm International Water Institute estimate that as much as half of all food is either lost or thrown away between farm fields and markets, or wasted by consumers.  That means that we could reduce total global water consumption by more than one-third if we could eliminate food loss and waste!

American households throw away about 30% of the food they bring home from the market.  If we could eliminate that waste, we could supply the in-home water needs of 500 million people.  That’s considerably more than the entire population of the US today (317 million).

4. Stop Wasting Energy

It takes a huge volume of water to generate the electricity that we use in our homes and businesses.  This is because water is used to keep coal, gas, or nuclear power plants from over-heating in the process of generating electricity. In fact, in the US, nearly half of all water withdrawn from rivers and lakes goes to cooling power plants.  Much of this water is returned back to the river or lake after use in cooling, but this returned water is often much warmer and therefore harmful to aquatic life.

It also takes a lot of water to produce fuel for our cars, airplanes, or other forms of transportation. It takes 13 gallons of water to produce each gallon of automobile gasoline!

5. Install water-efficient plumbing fixtures

By installing water-efficient toilets, faucets, dishwashers, and clothes washing machines in your home, you can easily cut your in-home use by 20% or more!

Want some more ideas?  Here’s a great list and here’s another of really sensible and smart ways to save water.