World Water

•Today, we can expect 6,000 people to die from lack of clean drinking water.  Most of them will be children.  Not only is this a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, but it also has serious potential consequences for the developed world.

Source Water

•American households use more than 10 trillion gallons of water each year.  That water leaves the house as sewage, much of which, after treatment, winds up in the same fresh water supplies from which we drink.

•A recent study found that medications from sewage were present in 80 percent of the samples taken during a U.S. Geological Survey and EPA study of 139 streams in 30 states.

•In many cities, the sewers overflow in heavy rains.  Every year 860 billion gallons of untreated wastewater swirling with raw sewage flows directly into America’s lakes rivers, and streams.

•Farm animals produce more sewage in the United States than humans.  That waste also winds up in our watersheds.

•Add trillions of gallons of industrial wastewater and you get the source water from which many cities must drink.

Water Treatment

•The fundamental technology relied on by most treatment plants in the United States is more than 100 years old.  The plants themselves are often 50-100 years old.

•Most water purification plants were not designed to remove chemical contaminants from drinking water.

•Chlorination, a mainstay of water treatment now appears to create chemicals that cause cancer and may injure developing human embryos.

Water Distribution

•The pipes that carry our drinking water have deteriorated to a point where it is not uncommon for a third of a city’s drinking water to simply leak into the ground.

•The National Academy of Sciences estimates that over the next 40 years we will need to spend almost a trillion dollars to replace 7 million miles of pipes.