You and I both know it’s important to treat water with the up most respect, it is after all our most basic and needed resource on the planet.
Yet I just didn’t know how needed this resource is. I just imagined that seeing as we get rain in this country (usually quite a lot in some places) that we only ever had to worry about conserving it when Britain was in the mists of a belonged drought.
How wrong I was
Take a look at this infographic below:
Photographic courtesy of Easy Watering
There are two big things that really stood our for me on the above poster:
- That we use 70% more water than we did 40 years ago
- London is drier than Istanbul
Both the above have come from reliable sources (although I’m still trying to track down year by year household water usage data), but I was stunned by the realisation that individual consumption (not household) has increased so dramatically in the past 40 years. What has happened to us, as humans, that we need to consume so much more water?
Is it the appliances in our homes, the amount we drink and use in cooking? Or is it that we use more on our gardens and cars for certain parts of the year?
And what about Istanbul?
It’s not the capital of Turkey but still it’s largest city with over 14.1 million people living there. In comparison London has 8.1 million people residing (although I don’t think that takes into consideration the increase in population with some borough’s seeing an increase of 5000% on a working day due to commuters).
I feel I need to look into this water consumption in some further detail.
In the mean time though, one thing is ‘clear’ – water is not to be taken for granted.
As a gardener I collect and use as much rain water as I can but clearly there are other areas in my life that use water and use too much of it.
I like many others are clearly taking it for granted because we turn on a tap and instantly we are rewarded with clean water but that seems to be only a very small part of an increasingly worrying problem.
Cover photo courtesy of David Pilbrow
