Creative ways to save water: reduce your use to support our rivers

By now, we're all familiar with the usual water-saving advice: turn the tap off while brushing your teeth, swap baths for short showers, and make sure to fix any leaky pipes. But with 2025 bringing England one of the driest springs in over a century, the driest January to June period in nearly 50 years, and hosepipe bans and drought declarations, what else can we do to take our water-saving tactics up a notch?

To answer that, we asked people across The Rivers Trust and our local member Trusts to share their favourite creative ways to reduce their water footprints and ease the pressures on our rivers and water supplies.

Around the house 🏡

1. Reuse water. There are plenty of ways to make use of water that would otherwise go to waste:
   • Let water from boiling pasta or steaming vegetables cool, then use it in the garden. It's nutrient-rich and can give your plants a boost.
   • Leftover water from your pet's bowl is also perfect for watering plants
   • Changing the water in your fish tank? The used water can be another great source of nutrient-rich hydration that your plants will appreciate.
     
2. Don't waste a drop. Capture and use water that normally goes down the drain without a second thought.
   • Waiting for the tap or shower to warm up? Collect the cold water in a jug and use it for drinking, watering, cooking, watering plants, or even flushing the loo.
     
   • Water your plants or cook with all the half-drunk glasses of water that get left around the house.
   • Store a jug of water in the fridge for drinking, rather than waiting for the tap to get cold each time.
     
3. Reduce your toilet's water footprint
   • Install a water-saving device in your toilet's cistern to lower the volume of water used per flush.
   • There's no harm in weeing in the shower to save on a flush (although, it's best to only do this in your own home).
   • Go a step further and pee on your compost heap to not only save water but give your compost a nutrient boost.

In the garden 🌱

1. Let the lawn go
   • Save water by not trying to keep your grass green during dry spells, it will bounce back!
   • Longer grass has deeper roots; by reducing the amount you cut it you can increase the water holding capacity of your garden, plus it's one less job to do.
   • Swap your grass for a clover lawn. This species stays green with less water, shades the soil, and slows evaporation. Plus, it's great for pollinators.
2. Mulch your plants
   • Use grass clippings, compost, pine cones, or leaves to reduce evaporation and keep soil moist.
3. Use targeted watering
   • Plant halos direct water straight to the roots, reducing evaporation and cutting water use by up to 30% compared to conventional watering.
   • Use a terracotta olla (a traditional, unglazed clay pot buried in the ground with only its neck exposed) as a method of slow irrigation. When full, moisture gradually seeps into the surrounding soil, directly hydrating the plant roots, minimising evaporation, and reducing water loss from runoff.

In the digital world 💻

1. Reduce your AI use. A recent study found that the ChatGPT-4 uses 519 ml of water just to generate 100 words and globally, ChatGPT consumes an estimated 39.16 million gallons of water every day. That's enough to fill 978,000 baths.
   
   • Don't use AI for unnecessary tasks like writing emails, creating shopping lists, checking the weather, and certainly not as a simple calculator.
   • Disable the AI function on your search engine and turn off AI suggestions on your streaming platforms.
2. Delete old emails and cloud-stored files. Data centres consume a huge quantity of water to cool servers (which is why AI is so water-intensive). It's estimated that by 2030, 6% of the UK's energy will be used to simply store our emails.
   
   • Delete old files, clear out your inboxes, and empty out those spam folders.

Have you got a creative water saving tip?

We would love to hear how you are reducing your water footprint, let us know over on our social platforms, @theriverstrust.