"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little."
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt
To draw the world's attention to the need to sustainably develop and manage fresh water, the United Nations declared 2003 the International Year of Freshwater. In a terrible irony, the tsunami disaster in south Asia has drawn immeasurably more attention to the desperate importance of fresh drinking water than any man-made campaign ever could.
While the numbers are changing daily, the world community is now looking at trying to supply at least 5 million people – more than 2 million in dire need – affected by this latest disaster with some form of aid. Fresh water and food are at the top of the list.
But at the best of times, one person in five around the world has no access to safe drinking water every day. That’s about a billion people worldwide. An estimated 14,000 to 40,000 people, mostly children and babies and the elderly, die every day from water-related diseases.
One look at a miniature globe with all that blue, especially when your perspective is from a country as water-comfortable as Canada, and it’s easy to be lulled into thinking water, water everywhere. Or one look at the troubling images coming out of Sri Lanka or Sumatra of survivors – so much water in the streets that people are wading through it. But none of it is fit to drink.
The UN Environment Program in 1999 reported that 200 scientists in 50 countries had identified water shortage as one of the two most worrisome problems on the planet. The other was global warming.
Only 2.5 per cent of the world’s water is fresh. Two-thirds of that is locked up in polar ice caps and glaciers. Of all the fresh water use on earth, 70 percent goes to agriculture. By far, meat is the biggest water user. It takes 1,800 litres of water to grow 1 kg of wheat, 2,380 litres for 1 kg of rice; and about 9,700 litres of water to produce 1 kg of beef or 3,680 litres to produce 1 kg of pork. The next big user is industry, at 22 per cent of all fresh water. Domestic use accounts for about 8 per cent.
Broken down by culture, we Canadians are some of the biggest water pigs on earth. We use an average of 638 litres per day, about twice that of the average use of a person in France. British Columbians are even bigger water hogs than the national average, using some 678 litres of fresh water each day, 65 per cent of that in the bathroom. We use only about 10 per cent of it in the kitchen. Consider all that water we wash our cars with, water our gardens and golf courses with, make snow with…
Compare that to the true minimum need of clean water for human survival that has been set by international agencies: 3 to 5 litres per day for drinking, with another 20 litres per day for cooking, bathing and basic cleaning. That’s about 650 litres less than you and I use every day.
It also means the world community is looking at trying to supply some additional 125 million litres of clean water every day in south Asia until proper infrastructures can be put in place for those impacted by the tsunami.
A nation of water pigs offers up some solutions
When it comes to world aid, Canada has a reputation for providing sanitation and drinking water primarily because of its Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), created to fly into disaster areas around the world to provide drinking water and medical treatment until long-term aid arrives. The team, composed of some 200 Canadian Forces soldiers, was set up by the military in 1996 because of their experience in Rwanda two years earlier, when international relief organizations arrived too late to save thousands of people from a cholera epidemic.
Right now, DART is on its way to Sri Lanka to help tsunami victims there. Besides the medical aid stations they set up, DART water purification staff can produce up to 50,000 litres of potable water a day. The technology they use is the brainchild of a Canadian company, ZENON Environmental Inc. based in Oakville, Ont.
If you caught Bruce Mau’s Massive Change exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery, you no doubt walked away with some idea of the disparity between the haves and have-nots of the world. You might also have noticed a little plastic bottle of drinking water called NEWater from Singapore. But this was no regular bottled water.
Municipal water managers take note: NEWater is recycled sewage water, rendered drinkable after being treated by ultra-violet light and being processed through long spaghetti-like strands of a special membrane that were also on display – strands of ZeeWeed from ZENON. In Singapore, the stigma of drinking one’s own toilet water is secondary to the practicality of supplying fresh water to a lot of people who have none of their own. (Singapore must pipe all its fresh water in from the Malay Peninsula, a source of constant concern for many of the 4.2 million Singaporeans who inhabit this tiny 700-sq-km island nation.)
The smart folks at ZENON have come up with a reverse osmosis process that uses the ZeeWeed membrane to filter out viruses and bacteria. Astronauts use the same technology on long hauls in space.
ZeeWeed-based mobile water treatment plants can be mobilized quickly. Besides the bigger units being used by DART in Sri Lanka, ZENON’s employees have mounted their own effort to get smaller units, which can purify all the domestic water needed for a single household, to areas where they will be best used.
Few of us knew it at the time, but ZENON has come to the water rescue before, only much closer to home. One of their mobile units was used to purify the E. coli-contaminated water in Walkerton, Ont., where we Canadians had a powerful, and in the face of this new disaster, very small glimpse of the tragedy that can unfold when fresh water supplies go bad.
It’s a fact
People around the world now spend $35 billion US every year buying drinking water.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer whose beverage of choice is water.
