Towards a sustainable use of shower water: Habits and explanatory factors in southern Spain

Abstract

One of the targets of Sustainable Development Goal 6 is the efficient use of water resources in all sectors in order to tackle water shortages. In the home, showering is one of the main water consuming activities. How can people make more sustainable use of shower water? To answer this question, this research analyses showering habits and explanatory factors of shower use. The study is carried out with data from 945 students of the University of Granada, Spain. Significant differences are observed in shower use during the summer and winter months: the average duration is 8.8 and 11.6 min, respectively, and the frequency is greater in summer (with an average frequency of eight showers per week). Determinants of different shower water use include gender, ideology, pro-environmental actions, inherent values, and connectedness to nature, among others. Those variables relate differently to duration and frequency of showers, according to the season, thus highlighting the importance of seasonality. The results show that there is room to achieve a more sustainable use of the shower, in terms of frequency and duration, through awareness measures that are tailored to groups that make a less sustainable use of showers. The main recommendation is that awareness campaigns should be designed on the basis of the user profile as well as the season.

Design and Construction of an Automatic Warm Water Media Shower Based on Arduino Uno

“…The bathroom has an important role as a place to carry out personal activities such as bathing, defecating and urinating (Heo & Jeong, 2021;Kusuma et al, 2024;Mendes et al, 2021). Most bathrooms in households still use dippers and manual showers as tools for bathing so that their use is less efficient because it can result in wastage of clean water and is impractical (Ibáñez-Rueda et al, 2023;Wong et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2021). In accordance with the regulation of the Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources of the Republic of Indonesia number 15 of 2012 concerning saving the use of ground water which has been explained in article 7 concerning using…”