Think about it this way: every time you push that handle, somewhere between 3 and 9 liters of clean water goes down the drain. This is water that has been treated and is safe for us to drink. Using this much clean water just to get rid of a little bit of urine is like using something very valuable for a very small job.
This might not seem like a big deal each time, but it adds up quickly. If a family uses the toilet about ten times a day, they could be wasting as much as 100 liters of water every day. Over a whole year, this can be more than 36,000 liters of water! In some parts of the world, people don’t even have access to clean drinking water every day, so wasting it like this is something to consider.
There’s a simple rule that some people who want to save water follow: “If it’s yellow, we wait; if it’s brown, we make it go away.” This means they only flush the toilet when they have a bowel movement. Urine itself is naturally quite clean and doesn’t usually cause immediate health problems, as long as the toilet is cleaned regularly.
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