Study on the water consumption of French householdsby Marielle Montginoul, UMR Management of Public Services Cemagref and National School of Water and Environment Engineering of Strasbourg (ENGEES)
The Water Framework Directive adopted by the European Union in December 2000 sets in particular December 22, 2004 as the deadline for carrying out an inventory. “This inventory includes for each river basin district an analysis of its characteristics, a summary of the impacts on surface water and groundwater and an economic analysis of water uses.
It also includes the register of protected areas ”(Ministry of Regional Planning and Environment, 2002). To achieve this, it is important to know the levels of water consumption by use at the scale of the river basin districts in order to end up with forward-looking scenarios in terms of water demand and water consumption.
In this context, the Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development raises the question of the advisability of setting up an observatory of domestic water consumption. In advance, it appears necessary to summarize the data already available, which is the purpose of this report (in the body of the text, we limit ourselves to the presentation of the studies conducted on household tap water consumption , excluding in particular the consumption of local shops). For this purpose, we conducted a bibliographic search based on paper documents, information available on the Internet and contacts with source persons.
This report presents, first of all, the main studies on which we have relied. He then presents their conclusions on the level of water consumption and summarizes the explanatory factors of consumption.