At a school as large as UCLA, it can be easy for students to lose sight of how their individual consumption habits affect the community as a whole.
Third-year environmental science student Hayley Moller headed a recent research project seeking to address this disconnect.
Moller led a small group of students who spent the winter and spring quarters collecting data related to student water use in residence halls.
“You don’t feel like you make a difference here … you feel so small in such a large building, and you don’t think that you taking a shorter shower is going to make a difference,” Moller said.
The team, one of three data collection groups organized by the Education for Sustainable Living Program, placed shower monitors in about 60 rooms on the Hill to record each shower’s length and the amount of water used per shower, Moller said.
The group also asked the volunteers in the rooms to keep track of how many times they flushed the toilet each day.
At the conclusion of the project, the team found that, on average, each person living in a residence hall uses about 117 liters of water, or about 31 gallons, in his or her room each day.
This is a huge number, considering that it does not include water consumed outside of the room or water used in food production and preparation, Moller said.
In addition to monitoring water use in a sampling of dorm rooms, the group also surveyed 10 percent of Hill residents about their own water habits.
Many students surveyed said they did not think about their water consumption because they do not pay for it, she said.
Despite this, the group found that many students were open to the idea of changing their habits.
“We started the program with the possibility of using a monetary incentive to decrease water use,” Moller said. “And what we found was that 70 percent of students said they would change their habits if offered some kind of monetary incentive.”
Moller said that decreasing water consumption in residence halls would save the school a lot of money, and that giving some of this money back to students could encourage them to think about their water usage habits.
In addition, she said that 52 percent of students surveyed said that water conservation reminders on signs or stickers in the bathroom would cause them to decrease water usage, and 35 percent said that educational programs regarding water conservation would cause them to change their habits.
The team’s efforts may aid in the implementation of new educational and incentive programs in the future.
Robert Gilbert, sustainability coordinator for housing and hospitality, said that the team’s data is currently being used by UCLA’s water task force to determine new ways to decrease campus water use. For example, Gilbert said that the task force was considering placing conservation reminders in residence hall bathrooms, as the group recommended.
The work of Moller’s Action Research Team in the residence halls is part of a number of steps being taken to decrease water use campus-wide, such as Hedrick Hall’s recent trayless experiment, which saved 6,000 gallons of water a month, about 1/5 gallon per person per tray, Gilbert said.
On campus, older buildings are being retrofitted with low-flow urinals and sinks, said Sustainability Coordinator Nurit Katz.
In addition, Katz said that more drought-resistant plants have been introduced to the campus in recent years, and drip irrigation has been used to decrease the amount of water wasted through landscaping.
The effect of these combined efforts has been a 71 million gallon reduction in UCLA’s water use since 2000, despite significant growth of the campus overall, Katz said.
UCLA’s decreasing water consumption is a trend also visible in the L.A. community as a whole.
Driven by city restrictions limiting sprinkler use to Mondays and Thursdays, water demand in Los Angeles reached a 32-year low in June, according to recent reports from the Department of Water and Power.
“I think it’s really critical, particularly because of where we live,” Katz said of the community’s water conservation effort.
“Water is a really scarce resource here, and one that we all need to learn how to conserve.”