No more bottled water!

In class we discussed the limited resource that is water. I took a public health class in my freshman year and this was one of our topics in which we had a guest speaker for. This woman studied African life most of her life and one of her horror stories from studying the culture up close and personal was the lack of water and its effects on the public. She said the typical woman had to go back and fourth from a spring 3-5 times a day, the spring would be far from the village and typically the woman would have a baby with her as well. So on top of holding a baby she would carry a huge bucket of water that would be very heavy. Sometimes the spring would not be full and the woman would have to wait until water would rise to the top. Not only is this strenuous work that pregnant women and women with children should not have to do on top of that the water is not safe to drink because there are no filters the government tried to fix this by dispensing straws that had a filter built in but this proved to be inefficient and a scarce product. Another way the government intervened was by making boreholes, a total of 3,000 in all of Africa but this also was inefficient since these boreholes would stop working, 90% do not function properly, and nobody knows how to fix them, leaving the villagers in the same state they were in. The problem isn’t that there is no water in Africa, these communities just simply can’t afford it, they can not even get electrical pumps to get water out of the earth they live on because their government wants to charge them money that they do not have.
On the other side of this water extreme is America and our water consumption, and it isn’t the water coming out of the tap that is essentially free, it is our growing bottled water industry. It is estimated that a consumer spends around 1400 dollars in bottled water a year, that is just stupid, when we can get the same thing from our kitchen faucet. In a article I read Pepsi’s Aquafina is TAP WATER in a bottle so we are wasting materials and oil to put water that is available to the majority of Americans in a plastic bottle. In fact it costs the US 1.5 million barrels of oil to produce these plastic bottles not including the oil in transportation. Since oil is also a depleting resource people should be aware of what they are buying and stop purchasing bottled water. There is nothing wrong with tap water since it is closely regulated and tested, in comparison with Africa we are extremely lucky to have this tap water so why waste money and oil.

sources:
http://www.off-grid.net/2007/08/15/why-no-bottled-water-from-africa/