2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
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.
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.
Could you not recycle clean water? e.g. a rough filter & chlorination of shower/dishwasher water to use for other things.
Some stages of a dishwasher without harsh chemicals might be used to water a lawn?
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.
a) Some of the highest quality drinking water in the world, taken from a regional or national spring and delivered to their home for a very accessible price?
or
b) Slightly muddy well water that they have to go and fetch in a village well? Assuming they live in a village and assuming that there's ground water available.
Which water would you prefer to drink?
The comment I was replying to was talking about plumbing, so my response regarded settlements larger than villages. Any village where the ground water is good to drink have already dug a well, so no use in telling them to dig a well.
There are vast degrees of poverty of availability or unavailability of infrastructure, across both the developed and developing world.
Shipping in bottled water, for instance, isn't a solution when the cost of shipping into the area (due to poor road infrastructure, or poor weather, or conflict zones) has prohibitive - or even intermittent - problems.
People already live around sources of water. At the scale of a township, it's generally long-term cheaper to figure out how to make your sources of water potable than to introduce a permanent dependency on a distant third party supplier, and a complex logistic network for something as fundamental as drinking water.
> ...delivered to their home for a very accessible price?
> ...have to go and fetch from a village well.
If someone can figure out to 'very accessibly' deliver bottled water from hundreds of miles away to your home, why wouldn't they be able to 'very accessibly' deliver locally sourced water to your home?
And if you have to go from your home to a distribution center for those bottles, how is that better than the proverbial village well?
Now you might think that it is outrageous that they buy and drink this water, that they don't deserve it and should wait for plumbing or better government water treatment. That they should be denied one of the basics of life in the holy name of hacker efficiency. Do you think they give a fuck about what you think? You are literally arguing to take away people's good drinking water because they live somewhere with lacking infrastructure.
> If someone can figure out to 'very accessibly' deliver bottled water from hundreds of miles away to your home, why wouldn't they be able to 'very accessibly' deliver locally sourced water to your home?
Because locally sourced water is not of the same quality or even drinkable many times. A river or a spring is in a fixed place geographically and not everybody can live on top of it. If you lived an hour or two from a large spring with high quality water, you wouldn't want to drink foul-tasting water from the tap or try to dig a well for some brackish water.
> And if you have to go from your home to a distribution center for those bottles, how is that better than the proverbial village well?
They deliver it to your door and with your permission they will cary the jars into your home and put them wherever you tell them to.
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).
Also, when comparing prices for necessities, the only thing that matters to an individual is the actual amount, not any percentage comparison. You've fallen into a mental trap that I've seen a lot of people fall into, by comparing prices by percentages. If most people in a developing country can easily afford clean water delivered to their homes, then it doesn't matter if it's percentage wise more expensive. Same thing if you buy some ramen noodles. It doesn't matter in the slightest if they cost 50c or $1.
This sounds like someone confused a picture of early telegraph poles with multiple circuits, before high density cables were developed.
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?
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...
The example stated for farming is 2000 liters per person per day for food. I'd like you to pause for a moment and think about that statement. A person can't eat a whole head of cabbage in a day, and you're saying that this head of cabbage would need more than two tons of water per day before it's harvested.
Likewise with the washing machine, you're talking about washing a full load per person every day. Who do you know that soils so much his clothes that he needs to wash a full load only for him every day?
Water to grow the grass for beef cattle is rain, as I assume at least a small minority of people reading here will know.
Your original comment is greatly upvoted and the people here actually believe that two tons of water per day per person is needed to grow their food. Per day. Per Person. I can't fathom what is going on in this forum.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
> 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".
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.
These numbers are to be taken with a spoon of salt though.
Randomly taking the Republic of Congo as an example, it's currently in an acute crisis as a result of heavy conflicts, and water is trucked by health international organizations as part of the relief effort [0].
So thar 8.6 point improvement on sanitization and clean water access on the EPI scale is a bit head scratcher [1]
It is by no means acute, DRC has been chaotic with war for decades and has likewise been towards the bottom of these kinds of lists of quality of life, an improvement from 2014-2024 is entirely believable because it wouldn't take much.
The news there from 2014 sounds very much like the news there from 2024
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/democ...
Did you read the article?There's a graph right there. The website also has lots of other data, most things are steadily improving.
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.
Today, there's some combination of factors that prevents this from happening to the same extent. A net good, but there's a downside.
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.
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.