LETTER: How to best conserve water?

Ideas came up such as turning the tap off when brushing our teeth, not flushing the toilet unless absolutely necessary, showering and collecting the shower water in a bucket so that the shower can be turned off quickly and washing from the bucket water.

In Worthing, 100 per cent of our water supply comes from groundwater, predominantly from the chalk aquifer which is widespread across the region.

Climate change is forecast to reduce our water supply. With this knowledge I ended up feeling quite angry, as although these are all useful tactics, they do not touch either on the amount lost to leakage and neglect of repair of water pipes, nor the amount of water needed to supply the nascent fracking industry planned for the Weald.

As hundreds of wells will need to be built to ensure profitability, and at least 200,000 gallons or 1,000 cubic metres of water are needed to constitute a high-pressure, high-water-volume frack, multiply this together and the number of fracks per well over time and you can see why Texas has used 97 billion gallons of water by this process since 2011 and is now experiencing severe droughts.

Can we not prevent this future disaster here in Worthing by choosing local, renewable energy projects instead? These will not use water in quantity or speed up climate change as the above.

We may then be able to have future showers without the need of a bucket.

Julia Owen

Lyndhurst Road, Worthing

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