Daily Dose of Common Sense

We use water every day without thinking about it. In fact, we can’t live without it. As you’ve probably heard at some point, we can survive for a few weeks without food but only a few days without water. Although water may seem abundant to people in developed countries, globally speaking, potable water is an extremely limited resource.

In fact, lack of access to clean water claims 4 million lives a year–roughly the population of Los Angeles.

So while more fortunate folks don’t have to think about water consumption, just a few quick facts may provide the incentive we all need to think about water as a resource, and to use it accordingly.

• Every 15 seconds, a child dies from a water-related disease.
• The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns.
• A five-minute shower in an American household will use more water than a person living in a developing world will use in a whole day.
• It takes over 2,900 gallons of water to produce a pound of coffee.
• On average, women in Africa and Asia have to walk 3.7 miles to collect water.

It’s unrealistic to think that few alarming factoids will immediately impact our daily water consumption.

Or, is it?

If every person in the United States chose just one way to save 1 gallon of water each day, we would conserve 307,183,727 gallons per day.

Pretty impressive, don’t you think?

To see water footprints check out this chart:
http://awesome.good.is/transparency/web/trans0309walkthisway.html

To educate yourself about the global water crisis:
http://water.org/

To find ways that might work for you to reduce your water consumption:
http://www.wateruseitwisely.com/100-ways-to-conserve/index.php

Photo courtesy of Flickr: darkpatator

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 7:57 am and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.