My hometown is Peters Township, which is a township located in Washington County Pennsylvania. At my house we have two sources of water. Our main source of water is through the municipality. The second source of water is from a private well on my parent’s property. The wells source is the water table. For this project I am going to focus on the municipally supplied water. The Pennsylvania America Water Company supplies the water to Peters Township municipality. The Pennsylvania America Water company reports the sources of water are broken down as follows: 92% surface water, 7% wells, and 1% purchased. They also report that for Pittsburgh and the surrounding areas, the Monongahela River is the only surface water source. The Pennsylvania America Water Company reports that the Monongahela River is able to provide up to 110 million gallons of water per day. After the water is used, it goes into the drainpipes and into a sand mound on my parent’s property. The sand mound filters the wastewater through various layers of filtering materials and ultimately reenters the water table. Solids are left behind in tanks that are pumped out every two years.

Using the water USGS website estimations, I approximated that I used 247 gallons of water on Feb 09^th. I would assume this is fairly accurate and representative of a normal day for me. I work in a research lab and today I washed glassware for 30 minutes. I use tap water and distilled water to clean the glassware so I doubled the USGS estimation from 2gallons/minutes to 4 gallons/minutes for dishwashing by hand.   The main areas of water usage in my life are consumption, hygiene, and work. I value my water usage for hygiene and consumption. If I were to restrict my water usage to 2 gallons of water a day, I would not be able to continue working in a research lab. On a personal level, I need to shorten my shower time, turn off water while it is not necessary, and decrease the frequency of showers. It would also be beneficial to upgrade to a newer toilet that uses less water and has an option for solid vs. liquid waste. Unfortunately, with my current work, the two-gallon a day challenge would fail. In the laboratory we do a minimum for 6 water rinses (3 from the tap and 3 distilled) for each piece of glassware. There is no way to avoid this seeing as this is protocol to avoid emulsions and contamination. If I were only focusing on my personal life, I feel that with a lot of effort I would be able to dramatically decrease my water usage. Geography plays an important role in water availability. Various parts of the world and country have scarce amounts of water. For example, the drought in California has made many Californians more conscious of their water usage than people who live in areas without a water scarcity.