Every day is Earth day!

When you live in an African village without running water or electricity, every day is Earth Day! A lot of days I can’t wait to get out of here, I can’t wait to get back to America. But, one of the things that I really love about living here and “roughing it” is how gentle our impact on the earth is. We do have a bit of electricity through solar power (you can see about it in this post & this post, too). But, solar energy is so amazing. I have no electric bill and I am not using nonrenewable resources. Sure, I don’t always have electricity when it’s rainy, but it’s so good for the environment, I want all American hippies trying to save the earth to try living like this for a few months.
Similarly, we don’t have running water in the house. We have to go to a nearby water source and carry it home by buckets. This results in some serious water saving techniques so that we don’t have to carry as much water. It also results in water conservation. To be even more earth friendly, you can catch your rain water, like we did last year.
Idea: Reusing laundry water to be our flush water. An idea that developing nations should try to engineer. Why use clean water to flush our toilets?

Step 1: Draw one bucket of water from nearby water source. use 3/4 of the bucket to wash your laundry.

Step 2: use remaining 1/4 of water to rinse laundry

Step 3: when water becomes too dirty to do more laundry such as above, do not discard. This is your flush your toilet water.

Step 4: fill your flush bucket with old, dirty water.
I haven’t flushed clean water in ages. It seems so ridiculous to flush perfectly good water. In fact, our flush water is not only used laundry water, it’s used dish washing water, used mop water, used hand washing water. All dirty water gets used as flush water. It’s my million dollar idea, why not figure out a way to employ these water saving techniques in our nice homes around the world?