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FringeHog Friday Five: The Future of Water
November 30th, 2007 
I took this picture on a visit earlier this year to Ipuli, a remote, rural village in located in central Tanzania. Ipuli, like thousands of villages, has no clean, reliable supply of drinking water. During the dry season, which amounts to about half the year, the villagers can’t grow crops, which severely limits their food supply. Small holes like this are the only water source for both people and their animals.
The boy in the picture is filling up a plastic bottle of muddy groundwater to take to school with him. It’s a heartbreaking but familiar scene played every day around the world. More than 1 billion people on Earth - about one sixth of the global population - has no access to dependable, safe drinking water. Compare that to the fact that in the United States, the world’s most industrialized and sanitized nation, smart, market-savvy consumers willing pay a 1000% premium for a product that is readily available for free in their own homes, just for the convenience of drinking it out of a bottle.
This week’s Friday Five looks at the future of water, one of the most critical issues facing humankind in the coming decade. While some nations, such as China, will thirst under the weight of its own industrialization, other regions will literally drown from natural disasters such as tsunamis and floods.
A fabulously designed infographic poster displaying the “virtual water footprint” (the sum of the freshwater used in the production chain) of selected commodities and nations.
The second installment in this New York Times series examines China’s pollution crisis: “For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China - even as demand keeps rising everywhere.”
When the Rivers Run Dry: Water - The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century
“Our demand for water has turned us into vampires, draining the world of its lifeblood.” So says former New Scientist editor and author Fred Pearce in this book that outlines (in graphic detail) the looming crisis in worldwide water shortages.
Business in the World of Water - Water Scenarios to 2025
Developed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development this report details three scenarios for the future of water built around five key drivers: people, politics, policies, past legacy systems and the planet. A lengthy but in-depth read.
From Fast Company, one the best articles I’ve read yet on the dynamics of the bottled water industry. While the article is chock full of sobering statistics (”24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi” and “If you bought and drank a bottle of Evian, you could refill that bottle once a day for 10 years, 5 months, and 21 days with San Francisco tap water before that water would cost $1.35″), it also explores the growing debate around the future of “ethical” consumer choices.
(MB note: We’re usually not preachy on this blog, but today is the exception. Bottled water represents a level of affluence and conspicuous consumption that is simply inexcusable. My personal hope is that in the next 5 years bottled water drinkers will be as socially marginalized as cigarette smokers. Because the fact of the matter is: we know better).
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December 1st, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Tappening is a joint venture between two NYC marketing agencies to educate and encourage the general public to decrease the consumption of the 28 billion bottles of ‘tap water’ we purchase a year. It’s the same as the water that comes out of your faucet.
You may or may not be aware that many of the largest bottled water companies in the world sell us tap water at $1.50 a bottle while using 17 million barrels of oil (in 2006). To put that into a little perspective, that is enough fuel for more than 1 millions cars in the U.S. for a year and generates over 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide. While we applaud the industries efforts to recycle, it is a fact that only 20% of these bottles are. The rest end up in the waste stream costing cities over $70 million dollars a year in cleanup and landfill costs.
The real problem is all the fossil fuels that have to be burned to make the plastic, fill the bottles, extract, filter, and purify the water, maintain the factories and warehouses, ship the millions of bottles, keep them cool at retail, and then process the waste — all for nothing, because the stuff in the bottle is no better than the stuff that comes right out of the tap. What bottled water has is a brand, and that’s what we aim to create for tap water, which happens to be in every way a much better product.
Our environment needs all the help it can get and this one is simple, yet could have such a large impact.
We are very pleased with the rapid acceptance we have found in the marketplace to hear our message. We’re thrilled to have the attention of Coca Cola (although they may not be), The Environmental Protection Agency, The Federal Drug Administration, the blogosphere and the press. Naturally we are thrilled to have over a half a million page views at our site (www.tappening.com) in under two weeks.
May 28th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I don’t like drinking tap water. I never have. It tastes bad, but not intolerably bad…that is, if I absolutely had to, I could drink plenty of it. Plus I don’t trust the local water authority to keep the supply drinkably clean at all times. Sure, there wasn’t much they could do when Hurricane Isabel necessitated a boil water advisory. But what about when the water changed noticeably green? They said there was no risk to the public. Yeah. Right.
I prefer spring water, like Deer Park. Deer Park really is good water. It tastes good. I don’t like Aquafina. I never did. It turned out Aquafina was tap water. Ah. That explained my dislike of it.
I’ve been dragging my feet to acquire a filtering system for my tap. I could save a lot of money. And that’s one thing that is important to me. Not being green. Saving my own green.
June 13th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
This is actually one of the few blogs that I want to keep up with.