Water is used for drinking (~2 liters/day)... Contamination here really matters.
Waker is used for cooking (~20 liters per day). Contamination here matters somewhat, since some forms of pollutants will be rendered harmless by cooking.
Water is used for washing (~200 liters per day). Contamination here matters a little too, because washing water can touch something which gets eaten etc.
Water is used for farming (~2000 liters per day/person fed). Contamination here barely matters - but some things can still make it into foodstuffs.
Providing small quantities of clean water is far cheaper than providing large amounts.
pluto_modadic · 5h ago
"far cheaper than providing large amounts" that doesn't factor in the cost of plumbing an entire town with 3 sets. remember photos of the tangle of wires when DC vs AC fought? It's more expensive especially for a suburb of single family homes to plumb in sewers and water mains (long distances for low flows), vs plumbing in duplexes and apartments.
having a secondary water system (e.g., purple pipes / grey water), for general lawn/washing and one for drinking/cooking - strikes a good balance. You don't want your potable water system to move too slowly.
You also should have water towers at different heights (higher pressure in the potable system). any accidental interconnects (these do happen) will flow /away/ from the potable one.
finally, letting people use rainwater, runoff, and letting them recycle lightly used potable water for other uses (like flushing toilets, watering gardens) is good - try to get every liter of water used twice as a goal.
bonus: get past the ick factor and allow your sewage to be re-used (purple pipes) as the greywater after treatment at the plant.
geodel · 4h ago
It is about bottom 2 billion not having safe drinking water. They are surely not having suburban homes with 3 sets of pipes. Its a one water pump + some filtration/cleaning mechanism for few thousand people who come there and collect it type situation.
more_corn · 3h ago
You’re right it would be crazy to pipe clean water to our homes for drinking and deliver less clean water via ditch for irrigation.
No wait, that’s perfectly sane, normal and common.
carlosjobim · 4h ago
You don't need any plumbing for safe drinking water. It can be delivered to the customer in gallons and bottles. That's how it's done in large parts of the world.
CorrectHorseBat · 4h ago
But is that more efficient than having one set of plumbing with safe drinking water? I doubt it. Over here the price difference between drinking water from the tap and the cheapest bottled water is a factor ~200.
londons_explore · 3h ago
refillable water bottles are how it's done in most of the world.
You go to a water shop, hand over a bottle, and they give you a one filled with a 15 liters of water, and you'll probably pay around 5 USD cents for that. The water will be filtered (but probably not with reverse osmosis, so there might still be a few viruses and a little lead contamination in it).
The bottles will be filled thousands of times in their lifespan. The cost is higher per liter than piped water, but per person per year it's lower, due to the fact these people perhaps use only 5 liters per day of bottled water, and do clothes washing in non-potable rainwater off their roof.
0xffff2 · 2h ago
Hell, I do this for my drinking water in the United States. My tap water is perfectly safe to drink, but even after running through a brita filter it tastes aweful, so it's worth the 30 minutes a month it takes to got get RO filtered water from the water store.
neurostimulant · 3h ago
> Over here the price difference between drinking water from the tap and the cheapest bottled water is a factor ~200.
Does it take the cost of building city-wide plumbing installation and the water treatment facility into account? Someone (probably the government) have to pay for it and many 3rd world nations can't afford to pay for them except for a handful of cities (usually the capital city).
Yeul · 2h ago
I remember reading that in some Western countries up to half of the ultra clean drinking water disappears because of leaking pipes...
vkou · 3h ago
What's actually cheaper is not bottled water, it's a village well.
kccqzy · 6h ago
I noticed that in some countries tap water isn't safe for drinking but good enough for cooking; and everyone buys large plastic 40lb jugs of water for drinking. How much more cost effective would it be to adopt such a system as opposed to safe drinkable tap water?
londons_explore · 6h ago
Non-drinkable tap water is mostly due to water not being available 24x7x365. If a water system is turned off even momentarily, the pressure drops to zero, and sewage and groundwater seep into the water pipes, making it unsafe to drink.
Countries with unreliable power grids usually don't have drinkable tap water for that reason.
It can also be because the water isn't treated (ie. it is just rainwater in the pipes). Water treatment actually isn't very expensive though - collecting the water and distributing the water are by far the biggest costs.
njarboe · 5h ago
In the west water systems are pressurized using a large reservoir and gravity. I imagine its similar in third world countries? They have unreliable water due to the reasons they have unreliable power: poor ability to plan, not enough supply, undersized systems for current use, deferred maintenance, etc.
wingspar · 3h ago
Ad hoc distribution…
‘Unauthorized’ distribution…
Chris2048 · 3h ago
> sewage and groundwater seep into the water pipes
How does this happen? Are they not sealed?
neurostimulant · 3h ago
The pipes network is very long so small leaks will always happen somewhere due to accidents or wear and tear. These small leaks are enough to contaminate the downstream pipes if the water pressure drops and dirty water get in.
wingspar · 3h ago
Trees grow, pipes crack. Have irrigation pipe leaks at work. All from trees growing and cracking pipes.
carlosjobim · 4h ago
Just because you can drink the tap water, doesn't mean you want to drink it. Sure, if you are desperate. But most who have the means will prefer to purchase the better tasting and cleaner water from gallons, rather than drinking the treated water from the tap.
jillesvangurp · 5h ago
Mostly the water is more or less safe but chlorine is added in many countries. That won't kill you but it's not very nice. And those big containers of water are affordable enough that they are preferable for cooking/drinking. I'm currently staying in Portugal and I'm buying a lot more water than I normally do. Back in Germany, the tap water is fine. But I do buy a lot of sparkling water because I like drinking it. Also, my urologist mentioned that bottled/filtered water is a great way to reduce the chance of kidney stones. The same calcium deposits that eventually destroy your washing machine might cause you some issues with those. So, there's that.
sandworm101 · 5h ago
It isnt thay simple. As i kid we had non-potable water in the pipes. (Middle east) It was recycled water heavy on chlorine, safe for washing but not drinkable. Pressure was never the issue. We drank from a "sweetwater" tap, which also fed the hot water tank and the dishwasher.
Using safe potable water to flush toilets is silly. Splitting drinking from other uses is far more efficient.
londons_explore · 5h ago
> Splitting drinking from other uses is far more efficient.
This isn't universally true. Pipework (laying+maintaining), collection and storage is generally the expensive bit of any water system. The actual purification is fairly cheap.
That means having two sets of pipes to every house (one for drinking water, one for mid-grade water) usually costs more than just one set of pipes and having all water drinkable. Thats why it's rarely done.
The alternative is you use the pipes for non-potable water, and tell people to buy bottled water for drinking - more than half the world is in this position I believe. It helps that people drink perhaps only 1% of the water they use - so bringing 1% of the water via bottles on the back of a motorbike is viable.
sandworm101 · 4h ago
That isnt how it is always done. In not-dry countries, the non-potable water is generally collected locally. It is filtered rainwater from cisterns, not piped public water from afar.
carlosjobim · 4h ago
I'm trying to understand your examples. Those are absolutely massive quantities of water you're mentioning for cooking, washing and farming.
I assume that you cook and wash yourself like everybody else, and have a basic understanding on how much for example a head of cabbage should be watered each day. So what do you mean with these numbers?
GuB-42 · 2h ago
I just looked at my water bill, I am at about 150L/person/day, which is about average for my country. It includes drinking, cooking and washing. So less than then the 200+20+2 estimate but not by that much, if you enjoy baths and lengthy showers, 222L is possible.
And from what I've seen 2000L/person/day for agriculture is not too outlandish. The production of your garden is likely to be tiny compared to what you eat. A head of cabbage is maybe 1/10th of you daily calorie needs, and compared to animal products, vegetables have low water requirements.
So maybe it is not exactly right, but the orders of magnitude look correct. At least for the first world.
Yeul · 2h ago
In the Netherlands farmers and industry pay a lower rate than households.
It is only recently with climate change that an ATTEMPT is made to get water use down. For millennia the country drowned in water and the issue was pumping it to the sea not preserving it.
londons_explore · 3h ago
cooking includes the running tap under which you peel the potatoes, the water you boil the eggs in, etc.
washing includes the 150 liters a washing machine uses or the 100 liters in a bath or shower.[3] Spraying things down with a hose really uses a lot too.
farming is the one with most variance - but some crops have a super high number of liters of water used per kg of crop harvested. 1kg of rice = 5000 liters of water! [4] For things like beef, you really need to include all the water to grow the grass too...
If you have a source of water, providing purified drinking water is stupid cheap.
It’s the initial infrastructure that requires investment but after that, purification costs fractions of a penny per liter.
londons_explore · 6h ago
Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village!
The solution is to tell them why clean water matters, and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean. Ie. a water filter.
The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water.
The best water filters - pumped reverse osmosis systems - are still only a few hundred dollars, and will also give a family drinking water for many years.
In thailand for example, vending machines exist which cost a few cents to use and will dispense a few liters of filtered water. These help spread the cost of the expensive filter between people and across time.
KingMob · 4h ago
> tell them why clean water matters
Wow, that's patronizing.
Most people without access to clean water are NOT tribes who have never contacted the outside world before. They're people in places with bad infrastructure, poverty, corruption, Nestle lobbying, etc.
londons_explore · 4h ago
Most of these people have lived off their water source all their life. To them, "it's fine".
They'd like it cleaner - but they'd also like their house smarter, their kids better educated, their bike cheaper to run and their roads to have fewer potholes. That's literally what everyone wants.
But without education, they won't realise that the slightly murky water is what caused their child to get sick and die, or that the arsenic poisoning is why they've been low on energy for their whole life and struggle to concentrate in class.
Most people - both in developed and developing nations - don't understand the importance of clean water vs all the other things they'd like in their life.
Heck, in my travels I've met a lot of people who get water from a stream to drink, and even own a water filter, but can't be bothered to use it because it takes a few minutes for the water to seep through.
stronglikedan · 4h ago
I'm sure it's applicable to some. This is too big and widespread a problem for one-size-fits-all anything.
squigz · 4h ago
Well GP listed like, 6 things. I have to agree with them that the vast majority of people without access to water are not so disconnected from the world that they don't understand the important of clean water.
mattmaroon · 4h ago
I mean yes but they also still don’t think it matters. It’s a thing they consider just part of life. It’s like how a lot of Americans don’t wash hands, a lot of the world still smokes, etc.
You find plenty of democracies around the world with unsafe drinking water and no politicians really talking about it because the people just don’t care.
orsenthil · 5h ago
> Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village!
This! And this has been true for the last 40 years, when more people didn't have access to water. This just shows how a few people care for the rest, and majority fall along. This was with Cola-Cola from 1980s.
Today, it is with information. More people have access to bad news via WhatsApp (like Coke) than education (like safe drinking water).
meesles · 4h ago
Great comparison. I'm willing to bet that Coke was happy to watch water scarcity continue to drive more people to drink their products. Likewise modern news organizations care less and less about the quality of the news, and more about engagement which results in junk which manipulates emotions.
londons_explore · 3h ago
People going thirsty due to nestle buying it all for bottled water is a western media myth.
It's true that plenty of people have water shortages, but those shortages prevent them from watering their crops - there's still plenty everywhere for drinking - which is what nestle is selling too!
Bottled water is arguably the best thing in places where water is scarce, because very little is wasted, compared to piped systems where leaks account for far more water than what ends up getting drunk.
andrewmcwatters · 4h ago
> years
In Phoenix, I've never seen a water filter last because our hard water eats them all up faster than in other places in the US. There must be an ideal combination of filtration systems that others use here and elsewhere that I'm not aware of that last for as long as they do, but standard consumer ones that bring TDS down to zero have very little lifespan here.
I can't imagine what difficulties exist in areas with access to clean water, but I can't expect them to all also be easily filtered outside of processes like solar distillation or something else.
kccqzy · 3h ago
In the U.S. you probably don't need TDS to be brought down to zero. My water filtration system at home uses reverse osmosis and brings TDS from 150+ to just 20 and the filter lasts more than a year. (Those that bring TDS down to zero might use deionization instead.)
No comments yet
mattmaroon · 4h ago
I have a condo in Phoenix, put in a waterdrop RO filter. I change them on the manufacturers schedule, no issues. The TDS was really high before, but I got over 99% reduction. Not 0 but really close.
andrewmcwatters · 4h ago
Thanks for the heads up, I'll try that out.
nhecker · 2h ago
In case anyone else is wondering, "TDS" is Total Dissolved Solids. I had to look that one up.
makeitdouble · 6h ago
This a truly big problem that has been going surfaced for decades, and I honestly have become split...
On one side, France in particular, but many other "developed" nations as well have stepped in to build the infrastructure and provide clean water to places where it was problematic.
Only to monopolize water distribution one way or the other, resulting in people not able to afford the water at the end, while losing their previous precarious access to dirty but natural sources as well.
Nestle, Danone are the poster child of these predatory moves.
On the other side, there few places poorer countries can turn to. Japan might be one, but they suck at diplomacy. Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance.
And places lacking water tend to lack education and political freedom as well.
I'd want to hold higher hopes, but it only ever progresses so slowly, as the incentives are basically stacked against real progress.
Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?
colechristensen · 4h ago
>Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?
Yes, things are improving all the time. There are all sorts of organizations recording various metrics of quality of life kinds of things and the trends across the board are upwards, it's just very easy to live in a bubble and have no idea how things actually are across the world.
>Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?
Did you read the article?There's a graph right there. The website also has lots of other data, most things are steadily improving.
sofixa · 5h ago
> On one side, France in particular, but many other "developed" nations as well have stepped in to build the infrastructure and provide clean water to places where it was problematic.
> Only to monopolize water distribution one way or the other, resulting in people not able to afford the water at the end, while losing their previous precarious access to dirty but natural sources as well.
> Nestle, Danone are the poster child of these predatory moves.
I've heard of Nestlé monopolising water in developing countries, but didn't know Danone nor France itself (private companies, Swiss or French, aren't "France") being involved. Do you have concrete stories you can share?
makeitdouble · 5h ago
For Danone it's more of a growing ambition. They've depleted water sources in France at multiple times and have declared aiming for more engagement on the African market for the next decades [0]. Their involvement is more in partnership with Veolia which holds the main contracts [1], so I should have put Veolia forward for more clarity, but I see Danone as just not being good enough at this game to be shunned at the bigger players' level.
> nor France itself (private companies, Swiss or French, aren't "France")
These companies aren't existing in a vacuum, and the French government will protect these interests when shit hits the fan. Veolia in particular is basically a private arm managing a critical field that should be government managed in any other setting.
It would be like saying that Lockheed Martin is a private company that doesn't involve the USA, when the government will bend over backward to protect these interests.
Governments go to bat for their companies all the time. Via diplomacy, war, etc. Have you ever heard the justification for US bombs being dropped... 90% of the time its "to protect US interests", aka the US companies' ability to do business there. Trade deals exist to make it easier for one nation's businesses to profit in another nation. Foreign aid is similar - it's a nation paying it's own businesses for stuff to be delivered to another country... a nice combination of marketing, subsidy and to some extent "the first one's free kid".
Trying to separate the government of a nation and it's businesses is not so simple as "a government did it" or "a company did it".
ToucanLoucan · 5h ago
> Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance.
They need to dance no matter what, let's be real. Be that for the Chinese government, be that for whichever government, be it hearing out some religious org proselytizing at them, be it enduring stupid and infantilizing designs like those water wells that were powered by a children's spinning playground thing, it really isn't that shocking that these places don't have water still. You basically need to put up with some combination of public relations people who look down on you, celebrities who look down on you, politicians who look down on you, religious folk who look down on you, and all to get a damn well with a filter on it.
> Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?
There's nothing really to improve. This could be solved in a matter of weeks, if we wanted. But as with most things like this, the solution isn't sexy, it isn't interesting, and unless you monetize it as you describe, it isn't profitable. This isn't a problem silicon valley can solve with an app that's name is a regular word with vowels removed from it, so they don't give a shit. Nestle can't change people for it, so they aren't stepping up. Every charity comes with some or another condescending string attached, even if it's nothing more nefarious than they're going to take selfies or video or whatever with them helping the needy, that's not nothing and it's still denigrating.
Wells and filters are not a site of innovation, not really. We know how to build them, but the under-serviced people remain because servicing them won't make money, so nobody cares.
mslansn · 5h ago
They need to dance because they don’t have the intelligence and diligence to do things themselves. It’s not really anybody else’s fault. Beggars can’t be choosers.
ToucanLoucan · 3h ago
"Beggars can't be choosers" for... checks notes clean water.
That's certainly a worldview.
jenny91 · 4h ago
Dollar street [1] (linked from the article) by Gapminder is a fascinating resource for learning about what life is really like for many people.
I didn’t find this in the article, and am still confused. Do they boil their water? Doesn’t it help with disease? There was one example of the family spending time collecting firewood equal to time collecting water, but boiling was still missing. Also, what about filtering? You can do it with charcoal.
I was raised to both filter and boil tap water before drinking. I don’t understand why these aspects are not mentioned when discussing safe drinking water.
bluGill · 6h ago
> Do they boil their water? Doesn’t it help with disease?
Maybe. We need to specify what makes exactly makes some water sample unsafe before we can discuss anything. Sometimes boiling helps, sometimes it makes it worse. If your concern nitrates, lead, arsenic, or other things that won't boil, then boiling just concentrates the contaminates and makes the water worse! If your concern is bacteria boiling will kill the bacteria, but the dead cells are still there which may include some poison in the bacteria.
Most filters will not remove the above either. Water is very good at dissolving a lot of nasty things that you don't want in your body (that ability enables a lot of controlled chemistry and thus life as we know it!), and once dissolved it will go through a filter. We again need to know exactly what is in the water before we can discuss if a filter works or not, otherwise we should just assume the filter is not going to make water safe.
rtkwe · 6h ago
Most of the time boiling for water purification just means bringing it briefly to a boil to kill pathogens not boiling for an extended period so there's only minimal water loss so very little concentration actually happens.
ThrowawayR2 · 5h ago
IIRC, heating water to the boiling point is hugely fuel intensive and making charcoal is also hugely fuel intensive plus time consuming.
Exoristos · 4h ago
I'd be interested in learning more about places where people can't afford a fire.
vkou · 3h ago
They can afford it, but fuel and energy costs are the lion's share of their expenses, in a way they aren't in rich countries.
~1/25th of my expenses are spent on paying for energy. I wouldn't think twice about using more of it.
If 1/2th of my expenses were directed towards acquiring energy, that would be a different conversation.
And they can't just go to the forest and get some firewood. Population densities in the developing world in the 21st century are such that even if there is unowned land where you can do that close enough to where you live, it won't sustain your community for very long.
jp57 · 6h ago
I'm disappointed that the article conflates together "safe" and "convenient". Out of the 2B who "don't have safe drinking water", About 1.75B have an "improved source", which is a source that "is not free from contamination, [or] is not on the premises, or [is not] always available."
Of course we should work toward a world where everyone has clean, highly available water inside the home, but by conflating "unsafe" with "outside the home", the article gives the impression of trying to gin up support by exaggerating the safety problem. On some level, I get it. "2B People Don't Have Safe Running Water Inside Their Homes," is considerably less punchy, even if more accurate.
atomicnumber3 · 6h ago
I can see some amount of counter-argument though. If 95% of your drinking water is clean, but then you were thirsty at 2am and you wouldn't have more clean water until someone went 5 miles up the road to the "improved source" to refill buckets, and so you drank some unclean water that was convenient and you got sick... that's still a big problem.
Convenience is a safety feature. The safe option has to also be the convenient option, or people will actively seek out unsafe but convenient options.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
Usually you notice a few days before when your stock is starting to run out. If you make coffee every day, would you be surprised that you're out of coffee one morning, or would you notice the day before that you need to buy some coffee?
atomicnumber3 · 17m ago
My understanding is that these areas are services by a single well or spigot that serves an entire small community. Like in rural (poor) India. So you don't stockpile water for days, you're fetching it daily. But then meanwhile there's also "traditional" (unclean/less clean) water sources available much closer to or in the homes.
sophacles · 4h ago
I guess technically "convenient" is an accurate word. Yet.... "avialable" often includes half the family walking hours each way every day to fetch water, depriving the children a chance to be educated, and adults a chance to earn income or take care of other necessities. In a lot of these regions there is a fairly high risk of being attacked on your daily water journey... I'd consider a water source that exposes me to murder an unsafe water source.
Also since you're quibbling "on the premises" its worth noting that an outside spigot/cistern/well on the property counts, as does a common water source in the courtyard of a multifamily dwelling. Depending on how the property laws, typical housing layout, and culture work in an area, that could even mean an entire village having a well - I'd have to dig into that definition more thought. That's different than "inside the home" and it's fancy "turn on the kitchen sink for a glass of water" implications.
the_arun · 6h ago
What are the country/world leaders doing to solve this?
docdeek · 6h ago
Quite a lot, even if it is a long term project.
UNICEF reports that, "Between 2000 and 2022, 2.1 billion people gained access to safely managed drinking water and the number of people lacking at least basic drinking water services decreased from 1.2 billion to 703 million.” [O]
That’s not everyone but in about 20 years 2 billion more people got access to safely managed drinking water, and the amount of people who lacked basic drinking water dropped by half a billion in the same time. It won’t mean much to the 700 million who don’t have safe drinking water but progress is being made.
Sadly with the end of USAID a lot of this progress will be lost.
squigz · 5h ago
I don't think it will be "lost" - and I don't think UNICEF will stop their work even if the US doesn't give them anything; there are still plenty of other governments/organizations donating money
makeitdouble · 6h ago
The "solution" from the perspective of the leading countries:
That website blames the companies instead of their corrupt governments. It's always easier to blame the evil Westerners than to actually fix the problem. Bad vibe.
makeitdouble · 4h ago
It takes two to tango.
I'm not disagreeing, but corruption requires a corrupting company as well, and if we're going the moral route, bribing to get the upper hand on a captive population fits the "evil" definition.
Then again and again, western countries don't really need a more developed third world, and they won't bend over backward to create more competition for themselves. So supporting corrupt regimes has very few downsides from a G20 country for instance.
Banana republics are the most simple example of that, but it doesn't need to be that blatant.
horsh1 · 3h ago
How many of them have mobile or internet connection?
saddat · 3h ago
Makes you wonder where the likely hundreds of billions for third world countries went to ?
mytailorisrich · 4h ago
2 billion people is coincidentally the population growth since 2000. So overall I suspect this means that tremendous progress has been made on safe drinking water.
pfdietz · 3h ago
What happened to dysfunctional nations in the past was they got absorbed into empires or otherwise subjugated. This put a floor on internal dysfunction.
Today, there's some combination of factors that prevents this from happening to the same extent. A net good, but there's a downside.
sandworm101 · 5h ago
And how many of these 2B people life in China or India? Such countries that have actively decided to persue manned spaceflight and innumerable other prestige programs ahead of safe drinking water. Rather than doing thier job for them, we should be lobbying for these countries to put thier own people first.
sofixa · 5h ago
India in particular has a massive government program to bring running and drinking water to a bigger part of its population. Most countries are capable of doing more than one project at a time.
wsdookadr · 5h ago
Just invest more in AI and datacenters. Problem solved.
Water is used for drinking (~2 liters/day)... Contamination here really matters.
Waker is used for cooking (~20 liters per day). Contamination here matters somewhat, since some forms of pollutants will be rendered harmless by cooking.
Water is used for washing (~200 liters per day). Contamination here matters a little too, because washing water can touch something which gets eaten etc.
Water is used for farming (~2000 liters per day/person fed). Contamination here barely matters - but some things can still make it into foodstuffs.
Providing small quantities of clean water is far cheaper than providing large amounts.
having a secondary water system (e.g., purple pipes / grey water), for general lawn/washing and one for drinking/cooking - strikes a good balance. You don't want your potable water system to move too slowly.
You also should have water towers at different heights (higher pressure in the potable system). any accidental interconnects (these do happen) will flow /away/ from the potable one.
finally, letting people use rainwater, runoff, and letting them recycle lightly used potable water for other uses (like flushing toilets, watering gardens) is good - try to get every liter of water used twice as a goal.
bonus: get past the ick factor and allow your sewage to be re-used (purple pipes) as the greywater after treatment at the plant.
You go to a water shop, hand over a bottle, and they give you a one filled with a 15 liters of water, and you'll probably pay around 5 USD cents for that. The water will be filtered (but probably not with reverse osmosis, so there might still be a few viruses and a little lead contamination in it).
The bottles will be filled thousands of times in their lifespan. The cost is higher per liter than piped water, but per person per year it's lower, due to the fact these people perhaps use only 5 liters per day of bottled water, and do clothes washing in non-potable rainwater off their roof.
Does it take the cost of building city-wide plumbing installation and the water treatment facility into account? Someone (probably the government) have to pay for it and many 3rd world nations can't afford to pay for them except for a handful of cities (usually the capital city).
Countries with unreliable power grids usually don't have drinkable tap water for that reason.
It can also be because the water isn't treated (ie. it is just rainwater in the pipes). Water treatment actually isn't very expensive though - collecting the water and distributing the water are by far the biggest costs.
How does this happen? Are they not sealed?
Using safe potable water to flush toilets is silly. Splitting drinking from other uses is far more efficient.
This isn't universally true. Pipework (laying+maintaining), collection and storage is generally the expensive bit of any water system. The actual purification is fairly cheap.
That means having two sets of pipes to every house (one for drinking water, one for mid-grade water) usually costs more than just one set of pipes and having all water drinkable. Thats why it's rarely done.
The alternative is you use the pipes for non-potable water, and tell people to buy bottled water for drinking - more than half the world is in this position I believe. It helps that people drink perhaps only 1% of the water they use - so bringing 1% of the water via bottles on the back of a motorbike is viable.
I assume that you cook and wash yourself like everybody else, and have a basic understanding on how much for example a head of cabbage should be watered each day. So what do you mean with these numbers?
And from what I've seen 2000L/person/day for agriculture is not too outlandish. The production of your garden is likely to be tiny compared to what you eat. A head of cabbage is maybe 1/10th of you daily calorie needs, and compared to animal products, vegetables have low water requirements.
So maybe it is not exactly right, but the orders of magnitude look correct. At least for the first world.
It is only recently with climate change that an ATTEMPT is made to get water use down. For millennia the country drowned in water and the issue was pumping it to the sea not preserving it.
washing includes the 150 liters a washing machine uses or the 100 liters in a bath or shower.[3] Spraying things down with a hose really uses a lot too.
farming is the one with most variance - but some crops have a super high number of liters of water used per kg of crop harvested. 1kg of rice = 5000 liters of water! [4] For things like beef, you really need to include all the water to grow the grass too...
[3]: https://www.ariston.com/en-me/the-comfort-way/news/how-much-...
[4]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Country-average-water-co...
It’s the initial infrastructure that requires investment but after that, purification costs fractions of a penny per liter.
The solution is to tell them why clean water matters, and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean. Ie. a water filter.
The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water.
The best water filters - pumped reverse osmosis systems - are still only a few hundred dollars, and will also give a family drinking water for many years.
In thailand for example, vending machines exist which cost a few cents to use and will dispense a few liters of filtered water. These help spread the cost of the expensive filter between people and across time.
Wow, that's patronizing.
Most people without access to clean water are NOT tribes who have never contacted the outside world before. They're people in places with bad infrastructure, poverty, corruption, Nestle lobbying, etc.
They'd like it cleaner - but they'd also like their house smarter, their kids better educated, their bike cheaper to run and their roads to have fewer potholes. That's literally what everyone wants.
But without education, they won't realise that the slightly murky water is what caused their child to get sick and die, or that the arsenic poisoning is why they've been low on energy for their whole life and struggle to concentrate in class.
Most people - both in developed and developing nations - don't understand the importance of clean water vs all the other things they'd like in their life.
Heck, in my travels I've met a lot of people who get water from a stream to drink, and even own a water filter, but can't be bothered to use it because it takes a few minutes for the water to seep through.
You find plenty of democracies around the world with unsafe drinking water and no politicians really talking about it because the people just don’t care.
This! And this has been true for the last 40 years, when more people didn't have access to water. This just shows how a few people care for the rest, and majority fall along. This was with Cola-Cola from 1980s.
Today, it is with information. More people have access to bad news via WhatsApp (like Coke) than education (like safe drinking water).
It's true that plenty of people have water shortages, but those shortages prevent them from watering their crops - there's still plenty everywhere for drinking - which is what nestle is selling too!
Bottled water is arguably the best thing in places where water is scarce, because very little is wasted, compared to piped systems where leaks account for far more water than what ends up getting drunk.
In Phoenix, I've never seen a water filter last because our hard water eats them all up faster than in other places in the US. There must be an ideal combination of filtration systems that others use here and elsewhere that I'm not aware of that last for as long as they do, but standard consumer ones that bring TDS down to zero have very little lifespan here.
I can't imagine what difficulties exist in areas with access to clean water, but I can't expect them to all also be easily filtered outside of processes like solar distillation or something else.
No comments yet
On one side, France in particular, but many other "developed" nations as well have stepped in to build the infrastructure and provide clean water to places where it was problematic.
Only to monopolize water distribution one way or the other, resulting in people not able to afford the water at the end, while losing their previous precarious access to dirty but natural sources as well.
Nestle, Danone are the poster child of these predatory moves.
On the other side, there few places poorer countries can turn to. Japan might be one, but they suck at diplomacy. Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance.
And places lacking water tend to lack education and political freedom as well.
I'd want to hold higher hopes, but it only ever progresses so slowly, as the incentives are basically stacked against real progress.
Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?
Yes, things are improving all the time. There are all sorts of organizations recording various metrics of quality of life kinds of things and the trends across the board are upwards, it's just very easy to live in a bubble and have no idea how things actually are across the world.
https://epi.yale.edu/epi-results/2020/component/h2o
https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks
Did you read the article?There's a graph right there. The website also has lots of other data, most things are steadily improving.
> Only to monopolize water distribution one way or the other, resulting in people not able to afford the water at the end, while losing their previous precarious access to dirty but natural sources as well.
> Nestle, Danone are the poster child of these predatory moves.
I've heard of Nestlé monopolising water in developing countries, but didn't know Danone nor France itself (private companies, Swiss or French, aren't "France") being involved. Do you have concrete stories you can share?
> nor France itself (private companies, Swiss or French, aren't "France")
These companies aren't existing in a vacuum, and the French government will protect these interests when shit hits the fan. Veolia in particular is basically a private arm managing a critical field that should be government managed in any other setting.
It would be like saying that Lockheed Martin is a private company that doesn't involve the USA, when the government will bend over backward to protect these interests.
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/02/23/danone-pr...
[1] https://www.veoliawatertech.com/fr/ressources/articles/danon...
Trying to separate the government of a nation and it's businesses is not so simple as "a government did it" or "a company did it".
They need to dance no matter what, let's be real. Be that for the Chinese government, be that for whichever government, be it hearing out some religious org proselytizing at them, be it enduring stupid and infantilizing designs like those water wells that were powered by a children's spinning playground thing, it really isn't that shocking that these places don't have water still. You basically need to put up with some combination of public relations people who look down on you, celebrities who look down on you, politicians who look down on you, religious folk who look down on you, and all to get a damn well with a filter on it.
> Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?
There's nothing really to improve. This could be solved in a matter of weeks, if we wanted. But as with most things like this, the solution isn't sexy, it isn't interesting, and unless you monetize it as you describe, it isn't profitable. This isn't a problem silicon valley can solve with an app that's name is a regular word with vowels removed from it, so they don't give a shit. Nestle can't change people for it, so they aren't stepping up. Every charity comes with some or another condescending string attached, even if it's nothing more nefarious than they're going to take selfies or video or whatever with them helping the needy, that's not nothing and it's still denigrating.
Wells and filters are not a site of innovation, not really. We know how to build them, but the under-serviced people remain because servicing them won't make money, so nobody cares.
That's certainly a worldview.
[1]: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street
I was raised to both filter and boil tap water before drinking. I don’t understand why these aspects are not mentioned when discussing safe drinking water.
Maybe. We need to specify what makes exactly makes some water sample unsafe before we can discuss anything. Sometimes boiling helps, sometimes it makes it worse. If your concern nitrates, lead, arsenic, or other things that won't boil, then boiling just concentrates the contaminates and makes the water worse! If your concern is bacteria boiling will kill the bacteria, but the dead cells are still there which may include some poison in the bacteria.
Most filters will not remove the above either. Water is very good at dissolving a lot of nasty things that you don't want in your body (that ability enables a lot of controlled chemistry and thus life as we know it!), and once dissolved it will go through a filter. We again need to know exactly what is in the water before we can discuss if a filter works or not, otherwise we should just assume the filter is not going to make water safe.
~1/25th of my expenses are spent on paying for energy. I wouldn't think twice about using more of it.
If 1/2th of my expenses were directed towards acquiring energy, that would be a different conversation.
And they can't just go to the forest and get some firewood. Population densities in the developing world in the 21st century are such that even if there is unowned land where you can do that close enough to where you live, it won't sustain your community for very long.
Of course we should work toward a world where everyone has clean, highly available water inside the home, but by conflating "unsafe" with "outside the home", the article gives the impression of trying to gin up support by exaggerating the safety problem. On some level, I get it. "2B People Don't Have Safe Running Water Inside Their Homes," is considerably less punchy, even if more accurate.
Convenience is a safety feature. The safe option has to also be the convenient option, or people will actively seek out unsafe but convenient options.
Also since you're quibbling "on the premises" its worth noting that an outside spigot/cistern/well on the property counts, as does a common water source in the courtyard of a multifamily dwelling. Depending on how the property laws, typical housing layout, and culture work in an area, that could even mean an entire village having a well - I'd have to dig into that definition more thought. That's different than "inside the home" and it's fancy "turn on the kitchen sink for a glass of water" implications.
UNICEF reports that, "Between 2000 and 2022, 2.1 billion people gained access to safely managed drinking water and the number of people lacking at least basic drinking water services decreased from 1.2 billion to 703 million.” [O]
That’s not everyone but in about 20 years 2 billion more people got access to safely managed drinking water, and the amount of people who lacked basic drinking water dropped by half a billion in the same time. It won’t mean much to the 700 million who don’t have safe drinking water but progress is being made.
0: https://data.unicef.org/resources/jmp-report-2023/
https://themuslimvibe.com/muslim-current-affairs-news/heres-...
I'm not disagreeing, but corruption requires a corrupting company as well, and if we're going the moral route, bribing to get the upper hand on a captive population fits the "evil" definition.
Then again and again, western countries don't really need a more developed third world, and they won't bend over backward to create more competition for themselves. So supporting corrupt regimes has very few downsides from a G20 country for instance.
Banana republics are the most simple example of that, but it doesn't need to be that blatant.
Today, there's some combination of factors that prevents this from happening to the same extent. A net good, but there's a downside.