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SALT LAKE CITY — It might be embarrassing to admit, but if you’ve ever peed in the shower you’re not alone.
In one extremely informal BuzzFeed survey from August 2015, 81 percent of those who participated reported using their shower as a second toilet while bathing. Similarly, a poll from Glamour in 2009 found that 75 percent of the 1,000 women they talked to had peed in the shower.
Some claim taking advantage of shower time to relieve oneself could help with water conservation, so a reporter from IFL Science recently set out to crunch the numbers. In a story posted Thursday, Robin Andrews said the average adult urinates about seven times a day, bringing the total of water flushed down the toilet in the U.S. in one year to 1.3 trillion gallons.
“If you peed in the shower, you’d massively reduce this figure,” he wrote. “Say that this means that you only pee in a toilet six, not seven times, per day. This means that in just one year, you’d save 2,190 liters (579 gallons) of toilet water. Extrapolating this to the entire U.S. population, that’s 699 billion liters (185 billion gallons) of water saved.”
He concluded that if everyone urinated in the shower, it could make a real difference.
While urine is often believed to be sterile, a 2014 study from Loyola University Chicago suggests that it is not. So, if you decide to pee in the shower just be sure to clean it regularly — which you should already be doing anyways.
Have you ever urinated in the shower? Take our poll and share your opinions in the comment section.
Contact the author at ncrofts@ksl.com or find her on Twitter.
