Bottled Water

In preparation for the 30 Hour Famine Rally I am leading next Friday, I have been doing a good deal of research on water. At the rally we will be focusing on the fact that while we Americans are consuming water at an alarming and costly rate, so many in the world don't even have access to safe drinking water.

Did you know...

• One-sixth of the world (1.1 billion people) does not have access to safe water and even more (2.6 billion) are without adequate sanitation.

• The average American flushes 10 times more water daily than the average person in a developing country uses for a whole day's drinking, cooking, washing and cleaning.

• Bottled water can costs $7.50 to $11.00 per gallon in the supermarket yet tap water costs most customers only one-tenth of one cent per gallon.

• A child dies every 14 seconds from a preventable water-related disease.

• It takes about 2 to 3 liters of water to make every liter of bottled water, just to treat and filter it.

• It takes 72 billion gallons of water and 47 million gallons of oil a year, worldwide, just to make the empty bottles.

• Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

As if those facts were not disturbing enough, then there is this...