Don’t Wash Your Car At Home
Your car goes through a lot, battling the elements to get you from A to B, and keeping it clean can be difficult. While it’s tempting to wash your car at home to maintain its sparkling shine, at-home car washing could actually be having a dangerous effect on the environment around you.
Your garden hose wasn’t designed with your car in mind, and it could be using up to a hundred gallons of water per car wash – a figure that’ll be reflected in your monthly water bill.
A self-serve car wash only uses around 15 gallons, while an automatic one needs approximately 50 – 85 gallons. Taking your car to a professional keeps your utility costs down and prevents wasted water.
Consider where the water goes when you wash your car on your driveway, and the chemical ingredients in your store-bought exterior shampoo. This toxic concoction has to go somewhere, and either seeps into your yard, harming vegetation and your lawn, or into local drainage systems. Self-serve or automatic car washes were engineered to prevent this from happening, and either recycle water or transport it to a designated treatment facility.
However, it is not just the chemicals in your at-home car shampoo that pose a hazard, but the general dirt and grime that accumulates on your vehicle in addition to the auto fluids that keep your car running. These dangerous chemical compounds make their way into the water you’ve used to wash your car at home, and then threaten local wildlife and nature.
Conserving water and halting the release of man-made chemicals into the environment is something we should all be aware of, and by cleaning our vehicles at a professional car wash we can make sure we are not releasing harmful chemical run-off or unnecessarily wasting gallons of water. In short, Don’t wash your car at home – the couple of dollars you are trying to save by washing your car at home end up costing the environment, your lawn, your water bill, and even local fish and wildlife.
For more information visit – http://carwash.org/watersavers
