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Online Household Water Calculator, Australia

Project Summary:

To conserve water the ‘Help Us Help The Earth’ campaign was launched. The first challenge to Australian households was to reduce their water usage by 10%. Using our expertise in sustainability and water conservation combined with our leading edge technologies we produced an online water efficiency tool.

The Client’s Challenge:

With widespread drought an increasing problem in Australia, attention turned to the impact on native flora and fauna and urban water supplies. Together, Landcare Australia – a partnership between the community, government and business for the protection and restoration of the environment – and Banrock Station - a well known and environmentally conscious wine brand in Australia - decided to tackle the problem, launching the ‘Help Us Help The Earth’ campaign. The key objective was to reduce the threat to urban water supplies and securing water for environmental flows. Landcare Australia and Banrock Station sponsored the project and approached us to help scope and implement the campaign.

Our Work:

Using the skills in our team of specialists across the continent, we designed a unique, robust online tool to enable Australians to understand the water usage in their homes, how to make savings and the resulting effect on environmental flows within their catchment area.

To do this, we embarked on an extensive research program to audit and categorise all types of typical household water usage, focusing on areas where water savings could be made.

We then used the data to assess how potential water savings could impact on environmental flows and began to build the final product.

We had to ensure the tool was simple and easy to use as we wanted to encourage public uptake, so we kept the questions simple and the survey short, ultimately producing a bespoke, innovative interface.  

The Outcome:

The campaign, fronted by Olympic swimming legend Michael Klim, was launched in early 2008, supported by national press coverage. It has successfully encouraged Australian households to assess their water usage and, so far, results indicate that if those households adopt the recommended water saving measures, over 60,555 litres of water will be conserved every day – that’s equivalent to 9 Olympic swimming pools in a year. Over the campaigns life, the aim is to save 105,000 Olympic swimming pools full of water!