I’ll be honest: I’ve been putting off this post for a few weeks or maybe even months now. I don’t know what to say, because I have so much to say. There’s an urgency, a passion, and a burden on my heart for this topic lately, and I want to be able to effectively communicate–with all the right words and information–in a way that will move you. In a way that will inspire you to action. In a way that will prompt you to join me in this important cause.
Water. Fresh, clean water. You use it and I use it. We drink it, bathe in it, and waste it on a daily basis. (The typical U.S. American family of four uses 300 to 400 gallons of water every day.) Water refreshes us after a nice long run, it is necessary to brew our morning coffee, and it goes into the preparation of our food. We don’t even think about it. The week that I moved to Nashville was the week after the flood, and the city was still under water restrictions. I learned a lot that week about how often I use water, and what a bummer it was to do without. But even then, I still had a case of bottled water in my kitchen. My laundry and bathing habits were curtailed, but I wasn’t thirsty. I wasn’t suffering.
Between 900 million and one BILLION–with a B–people on this planet do not have access to clean water. Six thousand people will die today, half of them babies and young children, because they do not have access to the most basic necessity for life. Six thousand people. That’s the equivalent of 9/11 times two, happening every single day around the world. Two million people a year. On top of that, it is estimated that more than 30 million annual water related disease outbreaks could be eliminated, simply by implementing clean water and sanitation. Hmm. Go figure. Apparently if you are not drinking out of a muddy hole that cows and other people use as their toilet, you are less likely to get sick.
Can I share something with you? In the past I’ve been a bit of a water snob. I will go on record right here and tell you that I have a favorite water, and it is Fiji, and it is expensive. According to Amazon, I could buy a 12 pack of 1.5L bottles for the low, low price of $36.99. At a little over $3.00 a bottle, that really is a deal, compared to what I’ve paid for those large bottles at the gas station before.
Let’s just pretend I am a regular Fiji drinker, and I want to buy two cases of water per month. Twenty-four bottles of tasty, smooth Fiji water will run me about $75/month. And it will leave me refreshed and feeling good about myself every time I open my fridge and see those beautiful, esthetically designed square bottles. Mmmmm, this is the good life. Or, I could drink the filtered, fresh water running directly into my kitchen for a month, and use that $75 to provide roughly 3.5 people access to clean drinking water for the foreseeable future.
Since I’m on the topic: It’s not just me. Americans, we love bottled water. In fact, we drink more bottled water than milk, coffee or beer. (More than coffee OR beer. I find this fact staggering.) My grandma often tells me that when bottled water started appearing in the grocery store, right around the time I was born, she was taken aback. She thought it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever laid eyes on, akin to seeing jars of bottled air on the shelf, between the bread and cereal.
I’m with my grandma–it was and is ridiculous, but we as Americans spend $21 Billion dollars per year (2011 statistic, up from $15 Billion in 2007) buying bottled water. Whoa. We throw over 40 billion plastic water bottles into landfills each year, a waste of over $1 Billion in plastic. Why do we do this? Why do we have this thirst for bottled water, when 24% of the bottled water we buy is RE-PACKAGED TAP WATER, bottled by Coca-Cola and PepsiCo. We are paying them our hard earned dollars to bottle up and re-package essentially the same water we could get by turning on the faucet in our very own house. Our love and dependence on bottled water highlights much of what is wrong in our society and in our culture today: we are vain, we are lazy, we want instant gratification, and we are entitled brats who think our thirst is more important than your thirst.
Seem a bit harsh? Well, consider this: The bottled water industry essentially started in France in the 1970s, with Perrier, where it grew to a status symbol. “The Cool Kids Drink Bottled Water!” And in America, since we do everything bigger and better than the rest–well, we wanted to become the Coolest Kids EVER. Congratulations, we’ve succeeded. Oh, and my precious Fiji water?
Half of the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation — which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the Pacific Ocean and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.
The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity, something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from “one of the last pristine ecosystems on Earth,” as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze. Each water bottler has its own version of this oxymoron: that something as pure and clean as water leaves a contrail. – source: Bottled Water – A River of Money (Amazing article! Go read it next.)
Gross. Even if you are some sort of grinch who couldn’t care less about people on the other side of the world who are dying of disease and thirst, if you even care a little bit about our planet or strive to be green at all, that fact alone should leave a bitter taste in your mouth. It sure did mine.
I am currently campaigning for Charity:Water, an amazing organization I’ve mentioned and written about before. They work hard to bring clean drinking water to people all over the world, and ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT of every donation goes directly to water projects. They raise separate money to run the business side of their charity, and they even raise money to replenish the fees lost in credit card transactions. Talk about a commitment to the cause.
I’ve set a $5,000 goal for March 8th, two days before my 31st birthday. There is nothing more I want to see realized this year, than to see this campaign succeed, with your help, and provide an entire village–250 people–with clean drinking water, a promise that Charity:Water will back up in the next 18 months, complete with GPS coordinates to the well.
It’s a new year. A new year filled with promise and with hope. We all want to do something great this year, and this is our chance. Will you consider partnering with me? I’ve named my campaign, “Spare the Change: Be the Change,” because that is honestly all it takes. Spare change. Three dollars, five dollars, every tiny bit helps. Every tiny bit is not so tiny when it is pooled together to do something GREAT. If you can’t join me in the months leading up to March, I will not be at all offended, but please think about how you could make an adjustment this year in your own household. Maybe together everyone could cut out their favorite purchased beverage for a month, and then donate that amount. Whatever is practical and meaningful for YOU.
I hope I have opened your eyes to something you wouldn’t have otherwise thought about today. I hope it gets you thinking, and that your thinking leads to action. I hope you know that you CAN be the change you wish to see in the world. I know that together, we can make a difference, and without a whole lot of sacrifice on our part. It’s a big problem with a simple solution: We just need to want this more, for other people we will never meet, than we want what we want for ourselves. Yes, there are a lot of “wants,” in that sentence. We have that luxury. It is our wants vs. others needs. It’s jacked up and it needs to change.
The End.
