How do you balance conservation of water usage (during a drought) with requirements to rinse recycleables?
Which do you feel is more important? Conserving water during a drought and foregoing recycling items that must be washed or rinsed out prior to recycling, or, using scarce water resources to prevent potential recyclables from taking space in a landfill?
Which is most important?
You know, I’ve thought about this myself. And I live in New England where drought is not a big concern, but still resources are used in rinsing. I guess I wonder how important is a thorough rinsing? And what do you do about glass jars that hold say, mayonnaise and peanut butter. You need to use lots of water to clean those jars! Great question!
But you are asking a question so my guess would be priority for potential recyclables.
You also have to consider other factors such as the amount of water used to produce the new products of each item instead of recycling them (because manufacturing of many goods uses water somewhere in the process) as well as considerations such as pollution that effect the climate that could easily be increasing the severity of the drought in the first place. ( such as global warming caused by the waste of many natural resources.)
There are tons of things factories, recycling centers, and every day people can do to cut back on their water usage but in reality most water returns, including those in factories and recycle centers is returned back into the water cycle and is not truely lost. That said what causes most water to actually be "lost" is when it is consumed by people, animals, and plants. I think it would be wiser to cut back on the raising of livestock for meat during a drought, scientific studies have estimated it takes around 2,500 gallons to produce 1 pound of red meat.
So instead of forgoeing recycling I believe it would be more logical to look for the most wasteful, sgnificant drains on water,w here it is not returned to the enviroment, and focus on those.
Great question!
I try to rinse sparingly. Try using dish rinse water or other "clurty" (clean-dirty) water if you want to be extra good. Either way, you can reuse your rinse water for outdoor plants or to wet a compost pile whether or not the water was pre-used. This is a great conserver because if you are on a public sewer, everything that goes down has to be treated!
How about swishing the lightly soild stuff in a bucket filled with bleachy/soapy water, and just leaving the really funky stuff in the bucket for a while so the bleach/soap can cut it? If you do it right, there isn’t any real labor to it, and you can dump the rest down the storm drain with no bad effects.
Put them in the dishwasher. It uses the same amount of water to wash one plate as a full load. Adding one can or jar will not require any additional water.