MUMBAI: Global water crisis is deepening with each passing day. Even a developed city like Cape Town in South Africa is enduring one of the worst water crisis and it may allegedly run out of water next year, if not sooner. Closer to home, Kerala has declared 9 districts as drought hit due to shortage of water. There are 1.2 Billion people or almost 1/5th of the world’s population that live with water scarcity. In India, 330 million people suffer from regular water shortage issues with limited access to clean and safe water.

Taking matters in own hands, Godrej Appliances in India has launched its #MyACSavesWater initiative, which is aimed at sensitising people about this critical issue.

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Wondering how an Air conditioner can be a possible source of saving water? Here is the thought behind the initiative – Inside the indoor unit of an AC, there are evaporator coils that cool the warm air blown over it. This causes condensation and moisture forms on the coil, just like how water droplets form on a cold glass of water on a hot day. If run for a period of 8 hours, the air conditioner generates almost 10 Litres of water due to condensation. Generally, this water is taken out of our homes and discarded through drain pipes. However, with approximately 5 million units of air conditioners sold in India each year, that’s potentially 50 million litres of water daily that can be saved and re-used, even without considering the existing installed base of ACs.

Taking this insight and moving a step further towards water conservation, Godrej Appliances, launched its #MyACSavesWater initiative, to educate and encourage people to re-use this distilled water generated from air conditioners. It also provided 1000 customers of its Green Balance range of Air Conditioners, with a unique 10 Litre compact and collapsible water can, to help its customers collect this water and informed them of ways in which the water can be reused like for watering plants, cleaning purposes etc. As per the Indian Standard Code of Basic Requirements for Water Supply, a person uses about 125 Litres of water a day for bathing and cleaning purposes. With 10 Litres of water getting collected from air conditioners and then re-used every day for these purposes, we can save about 8 per cent of daily tap water.

Godrej appliances business head and executive vice president Kamal Nandi says, “Water conservation is a pressing concern in India which needs to be addressed at the earliest. In line with our ‘Soch ke Banaya Hai’ philosophy, the thought behind the #MyACSavesWater initiative is to sensitise people of the depleting water resources and encourage them to conserve water.”

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Godrej Appliances marketing head Swati Rathi adds, “We hope that the 1000 cans that we provided to our customers serve as an incentive to take up this drive and inspire many more to follow the example, irrespective of their AC brand. With every AC owner potentially saving 10 Litres water or more daily, we hope this simple soch will usher in a positive change and go a long way in conserving our environment.”

The campaign is being leveraged through social media to reach out to all users of air conditioners, as anyone can help conserve water, irrespective of the brand of air conditioners they use. A video explaining the movement has been shared on our Facebook, Twitter and YouTube social media handles and our website.

A series of posts have also gone up on our social media handles educating the people about the water shortage crisis, the current consumption of tap water and how this simple act of collecting and re-using the water generated from the usage of air conditioners can save millions of litres of water .An emailer and SMS is being sent to all customers, employees and channel partners to take up this initiative and help spread the word.

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