Blog Action Day 2010

Blog Action Day 2010 is an initiative to help spread awareness about the world wide water crisis.

Nearly 1 billion people lack access to clean water.

To put that number in perspective, there are only 307 million people living in the United States and only 6.7 billion people living on the entire planet!

Worse still, nearly 42,000 people die EACH WEEK from unsafe water. Many of these deaths are children under the age of 5 who die from drinking unsafe water or from unhygienic living conditions.

What can you do to help?

Leave animal products off your plate as much as possible. It takes 66 gallons of water to produce 2.2 pounds of wheat and 6,604 gallons of water to produce 2.2 pounds of meat.

Use your iPhone less. iPhone's require half a liter of water to charge. Considering there are over 80 million active iPhone users, that's a lot of water!

Say No to Plastic Bottles: The average American drinks 200 bottles of water each year. It takes over 17 million barrels of oil to manufacture those bottles -- 86% of which will never be recycled.

Shop less: That cotton T-shirt you're wearing took 1,514 liters of water to produce. Jean require an extra 6,813 liters.

Conserve. The average person uses 465 liters of water per day.

My individual water use was higher than the average 1,190.5 gallons per day Americans use...not what I wanted to find out. I do know that we are home all day, so that figures in. We do have the low-flow toilets now, but our faucets and shower heads are not. (Something to look in to!) And I do water our yard & garden. We will be doing some back yard renovations this Spring, so maybe the yard will get smaller.

You can figure out your water footprint & make small changes to use less water.