Did you now that 1 litre of oil can pollute 1 million litres of water? That’s a lot of water from a little but of oil!

So part of saving water is keeping it clean but not polluting with oil. Some ways we can help…

• don’t use oil if we really don’t have to – try non stick cooking trays and stuff
• check cars for oil leaks and fix them soon
• don’t throw oil down the sink – pour it in the bin, add it to compost or take to a drop off point (depending on type of oil)
• make sure boats & ships don’t have leaks or spills
• don’t leave oil where it can be knocked over and spill into creeks or drains
• walk as much as possible to use less oil & petrol

Posted: May 17th, 2009 under general, junior water, saving water.
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It’s school holidays so last week we had a trip to the zoo in Melbourne – just about the best zoo ever I think.

There’s a new water plant there – down near the back gate – and it’s quite big. It’s a big room and you can see into it through windows along one wall with information boards. Inside, there are lots of pumps, pipes, tanks and stuff. It was pretty impressive.

The plant takes water from rainfall and some of the enclosures and treats it so it is class A recycled water.

The recycled water is then used for washing animals, filling pools around the zoo, watering the gardens and flushes all toilets in the zoo. Can you believe they’ve used about 50,000 kilolitres in 4 years? That’s a lot of saved water…

Posted: April 14th, 2009 under collecting water, junior water.
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Did you know that to grow $1 worth of rice in Australia needs over 1700 litres of water?

That is a lot of water for a small amount of food. I’m not sure how much water it takes in other countries but it is less than Australia because they grow rice in wet areas – we grow it closer to the desert than the coast. 

Maybe some scientists could find a way to grow rice with less water? Or maybe we need to find better places to grow it?

I wonder if brown rice is better because it uses less water in processing?

Posted: February 22nd, 2008 under general, junior water, saving water.
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The order of water use, from biggest use to smallest, in Australia is:

agriculture
household
services
manufacturing
mining

Surprised? Don’t forget that agriculture incldues crops, livestock, tree farms and flowers.

As for how much, well out of 10 litres of water used in Australia, 7 litres are used by agriculture! That doesn’t leave much for the other users!

The break up is about

agriculture – 7 liters
household – 1.2 litre
services – 1.1 litre
manufacturing – .3 litres
mining – .3 litres

I wonder how we can cut back agriculture’s water use?

Posted: February 16th, 2008 under general, junior water.
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In garden class this week, we looked at who uses the most water in Australia. It was really interesting – and surprising, too.

If all of Australia used 10 litres of water in a year, how much would the following groups use?

manufacturing
households
agriculture
mining
services (electricity, gas, hospitals, fire fighters, sewrage, etc)

We had a 10 litre watering can and had to separate it into 2 litres bottles for each of the groups. I don’t think anybody got the order completely right, and none of us would have guessed the amounts.

Have a guess and I’ll give you teh answer tomorrow…

Posted: February 15th, 2008 under general, junior water.
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I am so excited to be able to write about water things with you – I love Precious Water and am so proud my dad and mum are making tanks to save water.

 Mum is going to help me with spelling and make sure I write things that are true, but mostly this is my bit of the blog.

On our holidays, we saw that many people don’t want a desal plant near Wonthaggi – they even have a website about it. I wonder if they’d need desal if everyone just collected rainwater and fixed leaky taps.

In case you don’t know, desal is short for desalination (glad mum helped with THAT word!) and just means taking the salt out of sea water so we can drink it. I’m not sure what they do with all teh salt then – maybe put it back into the sea or maybe we could use it on our fish and chips!

Anyway, I hope we can have some fun and learns some things together as Junior Water.

Posted: January 23rd, 2008 under junior water.
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Savign water must be part of all our lives – hopefully, our children will grow up with a greater respect for our natural resources and be used ot conserving those resources whenever possible. And it is in part for our children that we care about what we are doing to our environment.

Part of our goal at Precious Water is to educate people about water, which is why we provide this blog, articles and images on the site. In order to make it easier for children to understand, respect and conserve water, we are introducing the Junior Water section of our blog.

Junior Water is the child of Precious Water’s owners, and with her Mum’s help, she will post about water and the environment at least once or twice a month.

Posted: January 21st, 2008 under junior water.
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