Battling for water equality across the globeBy Lisa Van De Ven
Turn on the tap. Pour yourself a glass of water. Now pour another. Keep pouring until you’ve got about 2,445 glasses full.
You’d run out of glasses before you could get that far, but if you factor in the water used to create the things you buy and the food you eat, not to mention those long morning showers, that’s the total water usage attributed to every North American daily. Which means you’ll have to fill another 2,445 glasses (550 L) tomorrow and, unless things change, every day for the rest of your life.
Compare that to 630 glasses (140 L) in Poland, or just 45 (10 L) in a country such as Ethiopia, and you can see why experts say Canadians need to cut their water consumption. In fact, many would go as far as to say the water gap should be the most important green living concern in the world today, and that it’s up to North America—the largest water consumer—to take the lead in fixing it.
“I think that some of the statistics are just profound and tremendous, that we urgently need to be more aware,” says Rochelle Strauss, a Toronto based environmental education consultant and author of the children’s book One Well: The Story of Water on Earth. “By 2025, many experts predict that one out of every four people will live in a country that’s short of water, and by 2050, 4 billion people might be living without clean water. That could be almost half the world’s population.”
A Rare Resource
About 1 billion people across the globe already lack access to clean water, adds Anil Naidoo, organizer of the Blue Planet Project for the Council of Canadians. In some places, children—girls especially—aren’t able to go to school because they’re forced to spend up to 8 hours a day lugging home the family’s water supply, carrying about 20 L each time.
“There aren’t many kinds of jobs that can be done without some water,” Naidoo says, “and these issues fall disproportionately on women. That being said, it’s an issue for all of us.”
Canada’s Role
It all begins with how people perceive water in the first place. While pressures exist to start selling Canadian water in bulk to the United States, Naidoo says turning water into a commodity is a turn for the worse in the future of water consumption. Instead, he sees water as a basic human right. Unfortunately, he adds, the Canadian government does not agree. In fact, Canada has repeatedly voted against making water a human right, and in 2002 was the only country to vote against promoting water as such at the UN Committee on Human Rights.
“Canadians should be ashamed… by the stance that our government has taken on the issue of water,” Naidoo says. “On this issue we have taken the lead, unfortunately, in denying this very fundamental human right.”
Access to clean water, after all, is the cornerstone of many other human rights, including shelter and food. In a world where a child dies every 8 seconds for lack of clean water—killed by preventable waterborne diseases—basic health and safety rely on it.
In fact, when it comes to the green living issues the world is facing, Naidoo puts the water crisis at the top, even above global warming, which he says only exacerbates water issues by shifting weather patterns around the globe. “If we don’t treat water with respect, then there are going to be consequences,” he says.
Get Off the BottleNext time you put your change in the vending machine for a cold bottle of water, take a minute to stop and think. According to experts such as Lisa Gue, environmental health policy analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation, bottled water comes with its own list of environmental, social and health concerns.
Green living concerns begin with the bottles themselves. “A lot of people think the problem begins if you throw the bottle out, and that it’s just all solved if you recycle it,” Gue says. But while recycling is certainly better than not, bottled water has environmental repercussions no matter where you throw your bottle.
After all, the production of plastic involves petrochemicals (oil), and transporting the water for sale requires even more oil. In the meantime, adds Gue, many water companies are draining natural water sources.
All of that, and there’s not always any guarantee that commercially available bottled water
is going to be any better than simple tap water. In fact, it might be exactly the same. “Some of the major bottled water brands are simply using municipal tap water, putting it in bottles and then selling it back to us at much more expensive prices,” Gue says. And sometimes, the water can be less healthy. Cheap plastic used for water bottles can leach, contaminating the water over time. “It’s really quite ironic,” Gue says. “This bottled water is being marketed as the option for the health conscious consumer, when in fact it could be even worse than what’s coming out of the taps.”
And considering that even chi chi restaurants from Beverly Hills to Toronto serve tap water, you might as well save yourself the cost.
