• Most people in North America use 50 to 70 gallons of water indoors each day and about the same amount outdoors, depending on the season.
• Indoors, 3/4 of all water is used in the bathroom.
• In the average home, the toilet accounts for 28 percent of water use.
• One flush of the toilet uses 6.5 gallons of water.
• An average family of four uses 881 gallons of water per week just by flushing the toilet.
• An average bath requires 37 gallons of water.
• The average five-minute shower takes 15 to 25 gallons of water — around 40 gallons are used in 10 minutes.
• You use about 5 gallons of water if you leave the water running while brushing your teeth.
• An automatic dishwasher uses 9 to 12 gallons of water while hand washing dishes can use up to 20 gallons.
• Showering and bathing are the largest indoor uses (27 percent) of water domestically.
• A leaky sink may waste 50 gallons of water in just 24 hours.
• If every household in America had a faucet that dripped once each second, 928 million gallons of water a day would leak away.
• A leaky faucet can waste 100 gallons a day.
• Shower heads average 5 gallons per minute.
• Outdoors, lawn and garden watering and car washing account for most of the water used.
• Running a sprinkler for two hours can use up to 500 gallons.
• As much as 150 gallons of water can be saved when washing a car by turning the hose off between rinses.
• Washing a sidewalk or driveway with a hose uses about 50 gallons of water every 5 minutes.
• It takes 3.3 acre feet of water to grow enough food for an average family for a year.
• An acre foot of water is about 326,000 gallons. One-half acre foot is enough to meet the needs of a typical family for a year.
• Less than 2 percent of the Earth’s water supply is fresh water.
• Of all the earth’s water, 97 percent is salt water found in oceans and seas.
• Only 1 percent of the earth’s water is available for drinking water. Two percent is frozen.
• The amount of water on Earth hasn’t ever changed. It has been the same for billions of years.
• Almost 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered with water.
• The human body is about 75 percent water. A person can survive about a month without food, but only 5 to 7 days without water.
• Every day in the United States, we drink about 110 million gallons of water.
• The average American uses 140-170 gallons of water per day.
• People drink an average of two-thirds a gallon of water a day. In your lifetime, you will drink the equivalent of a backyard swimming pool full of water.
• Public water suppliers process 38 billion gallons of water per day for domestic and public use.
• Approximately 1 million miles of pipelines and aqueducts carry water in the U.S. and Canada. That’s enough pipe to circle the earth 40 times.
• About 800,000 water wells are drilled each year in the United States for domestic, farming, commercial and water testing purposes.
• More than 13 million households get their water from their own private wells and are responsible for treating and pumping the water themselves.
• Industries released 197 million pounds of toxic chemicals into waterways in 1990.
• You can refill an eight-ounce glass of water approximately 15,000 times for the same cost as a six-pack of soda pop.
• A dairy cow must drink four gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk.
• It takes about 49 gallons of water to produce just one glass of milk. This includes the water the cow drinks, the water used to grow food for the cow and the water needed to process the milk.
• 300 million gallons of water are needed to produce a single day’s supply of U.S. newsprint.
• One inch of rainfall drops 7,000 gallons or nearly 30 tons of water on a 60-foot-by-180-foot piece of land.
• Although farmers use more total pounds of pesticides than homeowners, they use much less per acre.
• One gallon of used motor oil can pollute one million gallons of fresh water.
• If all the world’s water were to fit into a gallon jug, the amount of freshwater would be just one table-spoon full. Yet almost half of our nation’s 3.6 million miles of rivers and streams are threatened or impaired.
• About 38,800 gallons of water was needed to make your family’s car.
• A lot of water is required to produce the food you eat. Approximately 1,375 gallons of water is needed just to make on fast food lunch (burger, fries and a soda).
• Around the world, more than half the drinking water we use comes from underground aquifers – layers of gravel, porous rocks or soil that trap large amounts of water.
• North America has one-third the population of Africa, yet North Americans use three times as much water.
• By 2025, many experts predict that one out of every four people will live in a country that is short of water.
• By 2050, 4 billion people may be living without enough clean water.
• Every day, all the world’s livestock (cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens) drink the equivalent of more than 160,000 large tanker trucks full of water.
• While dams make more water available, they also change the flow of rivers and can damage habitats.
• The water cycle helps keep Earth’s water clean. As water evaporates, minerals, chemicals and dirt are left behind.
• Water dissolves more things than any other liquid, so in nature, water is never really pure. It almost always has something dissolved in it.
• Every day, 2 million tons of garbage is dumped into Earth’s water – enough to fill more than 15,000 boxcars.
• When pollution in the air mixes with rain, it can turn into acid rain or even acid snow. This acid precipitation can fall thousands of miles from the source of the pollution, even reaching remote areas such as the Arctic.
• You can save up to 2,650 gallons of water a year just by making sure to turn off faucets so that they don’t drip.
• Sometimes blue-green algae grow very rapidly in rivers. This can occur in rivers that slow down, warm up and contain lots of phosphate and other nutrients. The algae produce a toxin that can kill animals, including people, who drink the water. People contribute or even cause the problem of algae by: using detergents that contain phosphates, using too much phosphate fertilizer on their farms and/or slowing down rivers by building dams and using river water for irrigating farms.
• When a river floods, the flood water flushes out the billabongs (small lakes that form when slow-flowing rivers change course and sections get cut off from the rest of the river) around it. This helps keep the billabongs and the plants and animals in and around them healthy. People stop floods by building dams. As a result, the environment around billabongs can suffer.
• Cleaning products break up the surface tension of water. Also, oil floats on the surface of water, making it unsuitable for most water life. To help protect water life, you should never pour oil down the drain. Also, if you use biodegradable detergents they will break down quickly before they harm water life.
• Many wetlands have been destroyed or degraded by people building new developments such as housing estates on them, changing the flow of rivers that supply them with water and/or clearing trees that surround them.
• Wetlands and the trees that surround them help keep rivers healthy. They filter out polluting chemicals and help reduce flooding. In dry times, water continues to drain slowly out of them. This helps maintain the water level in rivers and also helps supply underground water.
• People try to prevent floods because floods can cause death and destruction. For example, they build dams across rivers so that they can catch extra water and stop it from causing floods. However, many freshwater environments, floods are an essential part of the natural cycle. Preventing floods can harm these environments.
• Damming rivers can cause the river to start to dry up further downstream. Irrigating from the same river many times causes the river water to get saltier. This is because the water will flow through the soil back to the river many times, dissolving a little more salt each time. By the time the river reaches the ocean, it can be too salty for irrigation or drinking.

Energy Profile

• Indiana ranks 8th in the nation in total energy usage, according to the Energy Information Administration.
• Consumers in Indiana spend more than $14 billion per year on energy, with purchases of electricity and petroleum accounting for most of that.
• Approximately 40 percent of the total primary energy consumed in Indiana is used by power plants for the generation of electricity.
• Municipally owned electric utilities account for about 14 percent of Indiana’s generating facilities.
• Rural electric cooperatives account for about seven percent of the state's generating capacity.
• Driven by an energy-intensive industrial sector, Indiana’s total and per capita energy consumption are both high.
• Energy-intensive industries in Indiana include aluminum, chemicals, glass, metal casting and steel.

CO2 Emissions

• 38.4% of all CO2 air emissions in Indiana come from coal-fired power plants located in just five counties in Southwestern Indiana.
• Twenty-five coal-burning electric power plants are the major source of CO2 emissions in Indiana, representing 77 percent of all such emissions (natural gas-burning sources produce just under 20 percent in additional CO2 air emissions, while major Indiana industries and institutions produce another 2.6 percent).
• Indiana is the 5th largest producer of carbon dioxide air emissions from electric power plants in the United States (122,094,588 metric tons), almost 95 percent of which is produced from burning coal.

Coal

• Almost all of Indiana’s electricity generation is fueled by coal.
• In terms of fossil fuel consumption for electricity generation, Indiana ranks second in the nation in the number of short tons of coal consumed on an annual basis, surpassed only by Texas. (A “short ton” is how the U.S. has historically measured units of coal. A short ton equals 2,000 pounds, and is equivalent to .90719 metric tons. Most other nations use metric units of measure.)
• Indiana ranks eighth in the United States in coal production.
• While coal still supplies over 90 percent of electric generation in Indiana, over 50% of coal consumed comes from outside Indiana.
• Current Indiana coal reserves equal roughly 17 billion tons and Indiana mines roughly 35 million tons a year. (17 Billion / 35 Million = 485.71 years of coal supply)
• Indiana has moderate coal reserves in the Illinois basin in the southwestern part of the State but relatively few other fossil-fuel energy resources.

Natural Gas

• Nineteen percent of energy sources in the state come from natural gas.
• Indiana used to be a major natural gas producer, but now essentially imports 100 percent of the natural gas typically used for home heating, electricity generation and to power manufacturing facilities.
• Indiana’s industrial sector uses about half of the natural gas consumed in the state. The residential sector is the next largest consumer; roughly two-thirds of Indiana households use natural gas as their primary energy source for home heating.

Petroleum

• Indiana consumes 1.8 million gallons of petroleum every day, an increase of 300,000 gallons from 1999.
• Thirty percent of energy sources in Indiana comes from petroleum.
• Indiana is a strong consumer of distillate fuels such as lighter fuels used in space heaters; diesel engine fuels for railroad engines, agricultural machinery and electric power generation.
• Conventional motor gasoline is used throughout most of Indiana.

Renewable resources

• Though a mere seven percent of the energy the U.S. uses comes from the sun, wind, crops and other renewable resources, even less – only 1.5 percent – of Indiana’s energy is produced from renewable resources, most of that from biomass for ethanol blended in gasoline.
• As one of the Nation’s top corn-producing states (fifth in the nation), Indiana has significant ethanol production potential.
• Indiana currently has six operational ethanol plants and nearly a dozen proposed or under construction.
• The combined production of the ethanol plants currently operating and those currently under construction will exceed 1 billion gallons of ethanol annually and will use approximately 390 million bushels of corn.
• Indiana is the fourth largest soybean state and has four biodiesel plants operating producing over 100 million gallons of biodiesel.
• Indiana possesses viable wind resources in limited pockets scattered across the northern half of the state.
• Earl Park, located in Benton County, is the home of a large Wind Farm designed and built by Orion Energy Group LLC. There are 87 generators. The Wind Farm’s Earth friendly power is being sold to local utility companies in an attempt to lower energy costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Holiday Waste

• From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, household waste increases by more than 25%.
• Added food waste during the holidays including shopping bags, packaging, wrapping paper, bows and ribbons adds up to an additional 1 million tons a week to U.S. landfills.
• Half of the paper America consumes is used to wrap and decorate consumer products.
• The wrapping paper transformation from a neatly packed present to a garbage bag stuffer contributes to the 25 million extra tons of garbage – an average of one million tons per week.
• In the U.S., annual trash from gift-wrap and shopping bags totals 4 million tons.

Cards

• 1.9 billion Christmas cards are sent to friends and loved ones every year, making Christmas the largest card-sending occasion in the United States.
• The amount of cards sold during the holiday season would fill a football field 10 stories high, and requires the harvesting of nearly 300,000 trees.

Ribbons

• 38,000 miles of ribbon is thrown out each year. The Earth’s circumference is 25,000 miles - enough to tie a bow around the Earth.

Food

• At least 28 billion pounds of edible food are wasted each year – or over 100 pounds per person.
• Putting one less cookie on a plate will reduce waste by about 2 million pounds.
• If every American throws away just one uneaten tablespoon of mashed potatoes it adds 16 million pounds of waste to our landfills.

Holiday Trees

• Each year, 50 million trees are purchased in the U.S. Of those, about 30 million go to the landfill.

Gifts

• The average American spends $800 on gifts over the holiday season.
  
• 82% of Americans would rather receive a photo album of times shared growing up than a store bought gift.
• If every American family wrapped just three presents in reused materials, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields.
• About 40% of all battery sales occur during the holiday season. Buy rechargeable batteries to accompany your electronic gifts, and consider giving a battery charger as well. Rechargeable batteries reduce the amount of potentially harmful materials thrown away, and can save money in the long run.

Transportation

• If each family reduced holiday gasoline consumption by one gallon (about twenty miles), we’d reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one million tons.