Bottled Water Industry

You may not know it, but water-related diseases are the biggest killer of children in Africa.

A reliable water supply and clean toilets could stop the world’s most vulnerable children being exposed to these deadly, yet easily preventable, diseases.

I’ve seen young children lose their lives to water-related diseases. But I’ve also seen how willing communities are to unite in hard manual labor, digging wells, making bricks to build latrines, and learning how to maintain pumps so that their families have the chance of a healthier, more prosperous future.

They just need some support.

Water Aid (via walking4water)

Rio de la Plata separates Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, from Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. For five hundred years, it has also been called la Mar Dulce because it’s size made people think it was a freshwater sea. Today, however, the river is famous for something else: it is one of the few rivers in the world whose pollution can be seen from space.

Blue Covenant p 105

One million bottles of exported drinking water causes emission of 18.2 tons of carbon dioxide. Worldwide, 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water every year, creating mountains of garbage and fouling waterways. Fewer than 5 percent of plastic bottles around the world are recycled; most are either incinerated, which produces toxic by-products such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals, or buried, where they take a thousand years to biodegrade.

Blue Covenant pg 99

This is an industry that takes a free liquid that falls from the sky and sells it for as much as four times what we pay for gas.

Richard Welk, professor of anthropology at Indiana State University

Americans consume the most bottled water (32 billion liters a year)…because bottled water costs anywhere from 240 to 10,000 times more than tap water, depending on the brand, the profits are very high in this sector [bottled water industry]. (For the price of one bottle of Evian, the average North American could but 4,000 liters of tap water.) The bottled water industry conservatively estimated to be worth US$100 billion annually.

Blue Covenant p82 on the bottled water industry.

Water companies provide the chemicals that purify water used to make computer chips-water too pure for ordinary human needs because it would leach calcium, zinc, and other vital minerals out fo the body,” reported Claudia H Deutsch in the New York Times. “…they ensure that Coke or Starbucks coffee tastes pretty much the same, no matter where you order it…they are even helping hotels, hospitals, and apartment buildings keep micro-organisms like the ones that cause Legionaires’ disease form circulating through plumbing and climate control systems.

Blue Covenant pg 68-9

These are ugly decisions, but you either drink water or you die.

Peter Beattie in response to public opposition to drinking recycled sewage water

For every of desalinated water, a liter of poison is pumped back into the sea.

Blue Covenant pg 27

npr:

Water In The Time Of Cholera: Haiti’s Most Urgent Health Problem

In the teeming city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, millions of people have no reliable water supply.

Many of the underground pipes that did exist were ruptured by the 2010 earthquake. Many public water kiosks are dry.

So life for most people is a constant struggle for water. And now that cholera has invaded Haiti, safe drinking water has become Haiti’s most urgent public health problem. Contaminated water is the main cause of cholera, which has sickened 530,000 Haitians since late 2010 and killed more than 7,000.

In Port-au-Prince, street vendors sell water in plastic baggies for a few pennies. Much of the city’s water supply is trucked in by commercial vendors or a dwindling number of nongovernmental organizations that took on the task after the quake.

On one busy street corner, just outside one of the city’s biggest slums, people with plastic buckets jostle to get to a length of garden hose that snakes out of a hole in the pavement — a source of free water.

A young woman named Marlene Lucien controls the hose. A self-appointed keeper of the peace, she tries to prevent fights from breaking out.

Is it safe water? “We are used to it,” someone replies. “It’s the water we use every day.” But another person waiting in line says she does worry about cholera. “We are scared of it because it can kill you within hours,” she says. But she has no choice; she has to drink whatever water she can get.

Haiti has never had the kind of water systems that developed nations take for granted. Chalk it up to decades of dysfunctional governments and unreliable international aid. Whatever the reasons, it’s never happened. -Richard Knox

(Video Credit: John Poole, Richard Knox, Jane Greenhalgh)