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from the read-this-while-having-a-nice,-hot-cup-of-tea dept.
When you hear about businesses with a high environmental impact or activities with a high carbon footprint, you are probably more likely to imagine heavy machinery, engines and oil rather than hairdressing. Yet hairdressing, both as a sector and as an individual activity, can have a massive carbon footprint.
Hairdressing uses high levels of hot water, energy and chemicals. Similarly, in our homes, heating hot water is typically the most energy intensive activity. For the cost of a ten-minute shower that uses an electric immersion heater, you could leave a typical television on for 20 hours.
So while it helps to turn lights and appliances off, the real gains in terms of reducing energy usage are in slashing our use of hot water. A quarter of UK emissions are residential and, of those, the vast majority come from running hot water. The longer it runs and the hotter it is, the more energy intensive (and costly) it is.
Mostly the hot water used carries a high carbon footprint, but the chemicals in shampoo don't help either.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday February 12 2019, @01:20PM
At one time (UK) showers were only found in sports changing rooms, and normal houses (built pre-1970ish) only had a bath, which people typically took once a week. Then there was a campaign by the water companies to get people to shower "because it uses less water than a bath". But that assumed people would only shower once a week, but people found showers more handy and thus the current culture of daily (or more) showers was kick-started.
But even that assumed that a shower uses less water than a bath. I have a 7yo nephew who spends 30+minutes in the shower. My boss's teen daughter would take so long in the shower that one day he timed her (going by the noise, from outside the door!) and later returned to experiment, directing the shower head into the bath. He found it filled the bath to the overflow outlet one-and-a-half times.
Personally I hate getting wet, and hate showers because I have less control over them than a bath. They also swing betwen scalding and freezing in my experience. I bath in about 4" of water, once a week. But some idiot one day will ban baths on the die-hard assumption that showers use less water.