Okay, you're about to read something that's never been done before. I am going to use math to prove why one fashion style is the best one. After you read this, you'd better make an appointment at your barber shop, because everyone's going to be rushing out to follow this hot new trend.
As you can tell from the title, I'm about to show you the benefits of having short hair. It's about to get all mathematical in the here, so hold on to your logarithms.
Okay, so my first assumption is that there is a linear relationship between the length of the person's hair and the amount of shampoo that they use. Now, there are several factors that interact with this (gender, age, socio-economic status, etc.) but within each demographic subgroup of the population, I feel confident making this assumption. Also, it may stop being linear beyond certain extremes, such as when a person has really really short hair or really really long hair. In the tail ends of the hair length distribution, the relationship may be more exponential or perhaps logarithmic.
That being said, I can further conclude that a person with half the hair length will use half the volume of shampoo. Again, there are complicating factors to this, such as a person with short hair will wash their hair less often, and therefore use less than half of the volume of shampoo, but we'll ignore that for this calculation. If anything, this assumption will only make my conclusions less conclusive, so if I can prove the environmental benefits with this assumption in place, I can say that the conclusions will hold even more so when this assumption is removed.
Now let's gather some figures. According to a case study done by the Boston Consulting Group, the average US household uses 19.5 bottles of shampoo per year. That's 19.5 20 oz. bottles, or 390 oz. per household. And, according to the 2007 US Census Bureau report, there are approximately 111,162,259 households. That means the US uses 43,353,281,010 oz. of shampoo per year. That comes out to 338,697,508 gallons of shampoo per year. And according to an article on Newsweek, up to 80 % of shampoo is water. That means the US shampoo industry uses about 270,958,000 gallons of water per year. That's roughly the amount of water that one person uses in 9279 years.
What if we were able to cut that in half? Think of all the water we'd save! How do we do that, you might ask? Well, Green Tip #42 is this: Cut Your Hair Length in Half. Yes, I know this means short hair will be popular among women because of this, but I should put the needs of the environment before my personal preferences.
Also, I didn't factor in the amount of conditioner or anything like that. Also, we'll save electricity by cutting down on hair dryer use. But that's just icing on the cake when it comes to how much water will be saved.
Now, there are two notable exceptions to this rule. Bald people, there's nothing you can really do to help the cause here. Kudos on being ahead of the game though. Just make sure you keep that head wax use to a minimum. And hippies, I understand you like your long hair. But odds are you either have dreadlocks (Nasty, but Saves Water!) or you just simply don't shower. Either way, you can ignore the above Green Tip. I think you've done enough for the environment.
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