Rachel Carlson

uses 82 gallons of water per day.

So 13 gallons?

So Erin is doing the math.

She's making all of these calculations and trying to figure out, like, how many times do I really need to flush the toilet?

Even her daughter, who's seven or eight at the time, is aware of it, too.

Yeah.

I mean, Erin told me that the kids were learning about it in school and just all of these questions were circulating.

When it comes to Day Zero, the exact circumstances of every city are different, but there are a few things that they tend to have in common.

Among them, leaky infrastructure, mismanagement of water, depleting aquifers, and more people living in cities, meaning more demand for water in concentrated regions.

And climate change?

And climate change, yeah.

I talked to Filippo Menga.

He's a professor of geography at the University of Bergamo in Italy.

really not the bonus card you want when your deck already includes all those other things.

Yeah, I talked about this with Manuel Perlo.

He's an economist in Mexico City where there's been an ongoing water crisis for years.

Wait, like leaky pipes?

Yeah, and that's a global problem.

In the U.S., the EPA estimates around 1 trillion gallons of water each year are wasted just from household leaks.

So there's a big engineering problem.