Towards a more water wise world
This week sees Stockholm, the Swedish capital, fill with thousands of people from all over the world who gather to attend World Water Week - the annual focal point for the globe’s water issues.
More than 3,200 individuals and around 330 convening organizations from 130 countries took part in 2016. Now in late August 2017, water experts, decision makers, business innovators and young professionals meet again to network, exchange ideas, foster new thinking and develop solutions around the theme ‘Water and waste: reduce and reuse’.
Water is the key to life. Yet our heavily populated world faces a host of pressing water-related challenges. Not least the thoughtless contamination and misuse of available water resources by plastics, chemicals and other pollution, which needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency.
Clean and safe drinking water is scarce. According to the United Nations, water scarcity affects more than 40 percent of the global population. And. 3.2 million children die each year as a result of unsafe drinking water and poor sanitation in the developing world
Even in developed countries, water quality is in crisis, due to pressures ranging from climate change to ageing water delivery infrastructures and pollution of ground water by chemicals and other toxic waste that is now being found in tap drinking water in America and Europe, for example.
In the USA, a Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) study said that 77 million people—roughly a quarter of the U.S. population—spread across all 50 states ‘were served by water systems reporting violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act in 2015’. The offenses ranged from arsenic to nitrate contamination, and included often-serious failures to test or report contamination levels, according to the NRDC, which said America is facing a nationwide drinking water crisis.
Consumer fear about the safety of drinking water has also fuelled the explosion in the uptake of plastic bottles of water, which in turn has contributed to the plastic pollution of our land and ocean environments.
Every 60 seconds, one million plastic bottles are sold, and global plastic bottle sales are predicted to reach over 538 billion by 2021. According to the UN 8 million tons of plastic leak into our oceans every year, which the Ellen MacArthur Foundation says will result in there being more plastic in the sea than fish by 2050.
At Bluewater, we see that as a scary future.
We believe everyone has the right to clean drinking water untainted by plastic and other contaminants. That’s why we have made it our purposeful intent to innovate and bring to market the best residential water purifiers and clean drinking water solutions that our passion and inspiration can generate. And that’s also why we extend our best wishes to Stockholm Water Week in the hope it will help lead to a world that is more water wise.