Water

You’d think that water, the topic for Blog Action Day 2010, would be something easy for a kayaker to write about. After all, this is where most kayakers spend a lot of our time, sitting in water. Well, expect for those paddlers in the niche sports of hill kayaking or snow kayaking. Then again, even snow kayakers need water, albeit in a slightly cooler variation.
I’m blessed to live in a part of the world with ample fresh water lakes and a large annual rainfall, and as I sit back drinking my latté at my favourite coffee shop, I undoubtedly take my good fortune for granted.
Did I mention that it takes 240 litres of clean water to make my latté?
That’s 120 large pop bottles worth of water to make one cup of over-priced coffee.
But all this talk about water is making me thirsty. I’ll just grab my bottled water for a cool refresher. Ahhh. That hit the spot.
Did I mention that it takes nearly 16 litres of water to manufacture the plastic for the average bottle of water? How’s that for ironic.
And on average, Americans drink 200 bottles of water per person each year. That’s 3200 litres each, or 995,200,000,000 litres of water for the entire population just to manufacture the bottles they use to drink water. 86 percent of those bottles will never be recycled. 17 million barrels of oil is needed to make all those water bottles, and that’s getting close to a day and a half’s worth of US oil imports.
That 17 million barrels of oil would would be enough to power 1,000,000 cars for a year, not that that’s a particularly good idea either.
In Canada, the percapita water consumption rate is 2,049,000 litres per year. That’s not quite double the world average of 1,243,000 litres per year.
I think I need to rethink how I drink my water.