I am not going to attempt to believe that the horrible inequality in this world will ever end. However, when something as completely free and plentiful as water is being hoarded by the wealthy it becomes a little excessive.
Globally, an estimated $100 billion US are spent every year on bottled water. Yet it would only take $30 billion to halve the number of people who do not have ready access to clean, safe, drinking water, and achieve one of the Millennium Development Goals established by the UN in 2000 (Earth Policy Institute, 2006).
Last year, the US alone drank 36 billion litres of bottled water. This figure does not include the 6 times that amount that is used to produce this bottled water.
6,000 children die everyday because they don’t have access to clean drinking water. They only need 2 litres per day to survive so that is 12,000 litres needed per day to prevent these unnecessary deaths. That works out to 4.36 million litres.
If you do the math, this means that last year alone, the US DRANK (not including the 6 times this amount needed for the production of the bottles) 8219 times more water than is needed to prevent 2,190,000 children from dying. One year’s worth of bottled water drank by rich, fat Americans (who have access to free, clean water in their kitchen) could save 2,190,000 children from dying for 8219 years.
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agreed, bottle water is one of the dumbest things in the world. We in North America insist on buying like $3 bottled water from Fiji, i mean ill admit it tastes good, but talk about greed. millions of people drink contaminated water from a stream in Africa and die everyday because they cant afford clean water, and we insist on taking water from that side of the world when the water comming out of our taps is good enough! Instead of buying there water, we need to think about helping allow those citizens to be able to live a day, knowing that they can drink water without the fear of dying. Our world needs to change, and its just as much of a shift in North America as it is in places like Africa, we must help..
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