There is a much better, cleaner, and saner solution: it’s called a composting toilet, and the simple, waterless technology is perfectly ready to be implemented everywhere on earth, preserving our water from contamination and turning a would-be pollutant and health hazard into a valuable soil additive (which we especially need in those clear-cut areas where the nutrient-rich topsoil has washed away). Composting toilets are a win-win-win scenario. Good for the water. Good for soil. Good for plants. All around good.
Living in the United States, where our toilets gobble up gallons of water (even the low-flow ones, although they’re an improvement), and where both warm and cold water are on tap day and night in more than 95 percent of households,44 it is easy to forget how valuable and limited a resource this is. Once you’ve spent a while in a place with limited water, as I have, it is impossible to ever turn on that tap without feeling a rush of gratitude.
In 1993, I moved to Bangladesh to work with a local environmental organization in the country’s capital, Dhaka, for six months. Bangladesh experiences tremendous regular water crises. There’s often too much and there’s often not enough. It’s a low-lying country, basically a giant floodplain where three major rivers—the Brahmaputra, Meghna, and Ganges—all enter into the Bay of Bengal. During the monsoon season each year, about a third of the country floods. Really floods. Millions of people lose their homes. Entire communities of char dwellers—people who live on the islands of silt and soil formed in the constant shifting geography of the rivers—disappear.
Bangladesh’s floods are getting worse for the same reasons that other environmental problems are getting worse. The clearing of forests upstream in the river basin—as far away as the Himalayas in India—causes greater runoff after rainstorms. Without the tree roots to hold the ground in place, the runoff carries more silt and soil, which settles in the rivers, making them shallower and more susceptible to flooding. Global climate change is raising sea levels, which, in a low-lying country like Bangladesh, means that the water levels in the ground itself are also rising, making the land less able to absorb water in times of heavy rains and floods. If sea levels rise 30 to 45 centimeters, as many scientists predict, about 35 million people will literally lose the ground beneath them and be forced to migrate inland from coastal areas.45 More than once during my time there, the roads between my house and office in Dhaka were flooded so deep that the bicycle wheels of my rickshaw were completely beneath water.
Paradoxically, in a country that is increasingly under water, it can be hard to get water to drink. Millions of people in Bangladesh rely on surface water, such as ponds and ditches, which are frequently contaminated with human waste as well as agricultural and industrial pollutants. More than one hundred thousand kids die each year from diarrhea, an easily preventable condition linked to dirty water. Meanwhile many of the wells have been discovered to be contaminated with arsenic, which occurs naturally in the region. In 2008, up to 70 million Bangladeshis were regularly drinking water that doesn’t meet World Health Organization standards.46
While I lived in Dhaka I shared a house with eight Bangladeshis. They drank the tap water, but since my body wasn’t used to it, the two women who did the cooking constantly boiled pots of water for twenty minutes just for me. I was acutely aware of the imposition of using so much of our household’s precious cooking fuel to prepare water for me to drink. You can be darn sure I didn’t throw even one half glass of water into the sink in six months there. After traveling through the country, seeing communities with no access to water, and experiencing real, all-encompassing thirst for the first time in my life, I savored every sip of water I had. I appreciated the fact that this water was in a glass and not flooding my home. It is a very different way to drink water: full of awareness and gratitude.
Bathing in Bangladesh was also different. Every other morning, I got one bucket of cold water. That was it. Sometimes it was so cold that I could only bear a sponge bath to wash those parts of me that most needed it. I did have one other emergency option: I could take a rickshaw down to the fancy part of town to one of two luxury hotels—the Sheraton or the Sonargaon. In the women’s restroom I’d spend a good twenty minutes scrubbing my hands and face with hot water before indulging in the only thing—besides hot baths—that I missed in Bangladesh: a really good cup of coffee.
Then I’d sit in the little café sipping my café au lait, listening in on the conversations of businessmen and aid workers at neighboring tables, aware of the sparkling water in the pool, aware that my cup of coffee required about 36 gallons of water to produce, and acutely aware that the only reason that such a grubby person as me was permitted to spend twenty minutes in their fancy bathroom was the color of my skin and the American Express card in my pocket. I wondered how different life would be for those hundred thousand kids who would die from lack of clean water during the next twelve months, if they each had one of those cards, or even a safe tap in their yards.
Having experienced the level of scarcity that is the norm for most of the world’s people, I am now more aware of the many ways that so-called advanced societies take for granted the one substance, after air, that we most need to survive. Remember we don’t just need it for drinking and bathing, but for growing our food too! Still, we let it pour down the drain when we brush our teeth, we dump everything from our poop to our hazardous waste in it, and we feed millions of gallons of it to our golf courses and lawns.
Did you know that in the United States we spend more than $20 billion a year on our lawns?47 On average, we spend twenty-five hours a year mowing them, often with power mowers so notoriously inefficient that they consume 800 million gallons of gasoline a year.48 And that’s before we even get to the water use. We’re pouring humongous amounts of this liquid treasure onto our lawns: about 200 gallons of water per person, per day during the growing season is used just to water lawns. In some communities, that amounts to more than half of the total residential water use!49 In the United States, the lawn, or “turfgrass,” is the single largest irrigated crop, three times larger than corn.50 Simply by replanting lawns with native plants that use less water and allow more rainwater to seep into the soil, rather than run off into drainage systems, U.S. homeowners could drastically reduce their water use at home.
As you may have guessed, we also use up a lot of this vital, precious resource to make our Stuff.
In fact, from my short list of key ingredients, water is the most fundamental one of all, because it’s a necessary input for virtually every industrial production process. Consider the fact that paper-making plants use 300 to 400 tons of water to make 1 ton of paper, if none of the water is reused or recirculated.51 Growing the cotton for one T-shirt requires 256 gallons of water.52 To get your morning cup of coffee, 36 gallons of water are used to grow, produce, package, and ship the beans.53 Producing a typical U.S. car requires more than fifty times its weight in water, or more than 39,000 gallons.54 Much of the water used in producing these goods is badly contaminated by the chemicals used in the production processes, like bleach (for paper or white T-shirts), lead, arsenic, and cyanide (for mining metals). There is always the danger that these toxins will leach into groundwater or overflow from holding containers into rivers and seas—if the water’s not dumped there directly, as is still too often the case.
Water is also necessary to power the machines that make our Stuff. I’m not just talking about hydropower (electricity derived from the force of moving water); all power generated from fossil fuels such as coal, fuel oil, and natural gas is converted in thermal power plants that need water to cool them down. Together these make up the great majority of the world’s energy sources, and they all use water.
So for all these purposes we need water, and we’re running out of it. Maybe you’re asking how can that be, on a blue planet that’s way more than half covered in water? Of all the water on earth, 97.5 percent is salt water; and most of the 2.5 percent that is fresh water is frozen in the icecaps or so deep underground in aq
uifers that we can’t reach it.55 Only about 1 percent of the world’s water is accessible for direct human use.56 This includes the water we see in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs as well as those underground sources that are shallow enough to be tapped affordably. Only this 1 percent is regularly renewed by rain and snowfall and is available to us on a sustainable basis. So we’re in trouble if we use too much.
It is that same 1 percent of water we use to meet all our needs for drinking, sanitation, irrigation, and industrial use. Increases in population, urbanization, industrialization, and consumption all mean that demand for water also increases. We’re using and wasting more water than ever before while the supply of clean available water is shrinking. During the last century, our use of water globally increased sixfold, which was twice the rate of population growth.57 There are more of us using more water. This is not a sustainable trajectory.
Already, about one-third of the world’s population lives in countries that are experiencing water stress.58 Despite all our technological know-how, at least one in six people doesn’t have access to safe drinking water. Every day, thousands of people—mostly children—die from preventable diseases contracted because they do not have access to clean water.59 In Asia, where water has always been regarded as an abundant resource, the amount of it available for each person declined by 40 to 60 percent between 1955 and 1990.60 Experts predict that by 2025, fully three-quarters of people on earth will experience water scarcity, a condition in which the demand for water outstrips the supply.61 Overuse of water, along with droughts, contamination, climate disruption, diversion for industrial or agricultural uses, and inequality in access to water all contribute to water scarcity.
As water becomes increasingly scarce, conflicts are emerging all over the world about its use, and perhaps more important, about the process by which its use is determined. Many people—myself included—fear that the growing phenomenon of private business interests managing water systems for profit is incompatible with ensuring everyone’s right to water and sustainable water management. Too often, the privatization of water systems has been followed by rate hikes, service interruptions, and an overall decline in access to water because there is often not money to be made in delivering water to the poorest communities.
Because water is absolutely essential to life, including the lives of future generations, it should be shared and allocated fairly. Programs to manage water must be developed in this context, prioritizing long-term sustainability, ecological integrity, community participation in decision making, and fair access rather than individual private gain. A global movement is calling for water to be managed publicly rather than by private firms, while a network of “water justice” activists are working for a binding United Nations convention that secures every person’s right to water. Already, General Comment No. 15, adopted in 2002 by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, recognized that the right to water is a prerequisite for realizing all other human rights and for living in dignity.62
Still, a number of giant multinational companies are working to privatize public water systems in the United States and around the world, making decisions based on market opportunities and potential profit rather than meeting basic human needs and ensuring ecological well-being and social justice. These corporations are working to expand the market for bottled water and to sell “bulk” water, which will be transported miles to its new market. As communities run out of their own water, they’ll be forced to pay for it from other regions if there is no other option. For this reason, The Economist magazine has predicted that “water is the oil of the 21st century.”63
The fact is, as with most of our dilemmas around diminishing natural resources, there is no one solution to the growing global water crisis; we need action on multiple fronts. Some experts recommend billion-dollar infrastructure and megadams, but I prefer what the Pacific Institute calls the “soft path” solutions to the global water crisis. In their words: “Soft path solutions aim to improve the productivity of water rather than seek endless new supply... [and] complement centrally-planned infrastructure with community scale projects; and soft path solutions involve stakeholders in key decisions so that water deals and projects protect the environment and the public interest.”64 Such solutions include improved technology, improved conservation, and truly democratic, just decision-making processes, all done in concert.
One major step in the right direction is just uncovering and identifying where water is being used and wasted, which often includes uses invisible to us on a day-to-day basis. Hardly anyone looks at a cotton T-shirt, a car, or a light switch and thinks about water. To bring this “invisible” water to light, a British professor named John Allan came up with the concept of “virtual water” to track the use of water in global industry and trade.65 Virtual water is the amount of water embedded in food or other products based on how much water was needed to extract and produce that item. Countries that grow and export water-intensive crops, like cotton and coffee, can be thought of as virtual water exporters.
Another helpful concept is a “water footprint,” which calculates the total volume of fresh water used for the goods and services produced by a business or used by an individual or a community. If you’re curious, you can go to www.waterfootprint.org and get a rough calculation of your own water footprint. Professor Arjen Hoekstra of the University of Twente in Holland explains his creation of the “water footprint” tool as “rooted in the recognition that human impacts on freshwater systems can ultimately be linked to human consumption, and that issues like water shortages and pollution can be better understood and addressed by considering production and supply chains as a whole.”66 In other words, the more Stuff that gets made, used, and replaced, the more water gets used.
When I calculated my personal footprint, I found that my total water footprint is about 500 cubic meters per year. I played around with the numbers and saw that I could reduce it by drinking less coffee, eating fewer animal products, and buying less Stuff.
I’d like to think that my grey-water system, which waters my garden with my washing machine drainage, after filtering it through a simple multitiered planter full of specifically chosen filtering plants, makes a difference. Variations of this system are used around the world to filter and reuse grey water in homes, universities, hotels, food processing plants, and other sites. My garden loves it, but I know that the water diverted is just a drop in the bucket compared to the water that was needed to make the Stuff I use every day. The use of water in agriculture, energy production, and as an ingredient in industrial production is where the greatest potential exists to reduce water use.
The true cost of water is another one of industry’s huge externalized costs, meaning the costs they don’t actually pay. The prices of Stuff don’t reflect water’s real value (which economists are only now beginning to calculate) or the costs of the degradation of water resources through pollution and contamination, or the ecosystem services that are impacted. To capture its true value, some people are beginning to use what’s known as a total economic value framework, which includes direct uses (like drinking water) and indirect uses (like the level and flow of a river) as well as the so-called bequest value (use by future generations) and “existence value” (the right simply to be present on earth).67 Along these lines, government representatives and NGOs from around the world created the Dublin Principles at the International Conference on Water and the Environment in 1992 to recognize the value of water and set standards for water management.68
This shift could motivate improved water productivity. If those hidden or “virtual” externalized costs of using and polluting water actually started showing up under “costs” on the balance sheets of businesses, companies would be highly motivated to reduce the amount of water they use or pollute. At the same time, we need to be sure that calculating the economic value of water doesn’t obscure our recognizing access to water as a basic human right. Assigning economic value to water is a strat
egy to better understand its overall value, not a step toward privatizing and selling it.
The hope is that if we make industries responsible for the full costs of water use, they will start employing the technological fixes to use and waste less. The tricky thing about economic, or market-based, strategies is that forcing companies to factor in externalized costs will invariably raise the price tags of goods, as industries pass the higher costs on to consumers. While in many instances that might not be all bad (after all, do we really need yet another 256-gallon-of-water T-shirt that we couldn’t resist because it cost $4.99 at Target?), increased prices for basic commodities can be devastating to the poorest people around the world.
There are people already at work on this very issue to ensure that everyone, even those too poor to pay, get enough water for their basic needs, while those who use (waste) water for luxury consumption or excessive industrial use are charged extra. An international coalition of human rights activists, progressive municipal leaders, trade unions, and environmental organizations—collectively known as water warriors—are collaborating to achieve the recognition of water as a human right, improved access to water for poor people, the decommodification of water, taxes for excessive water use, and the defense of elected municipal governments as the key institution in water delivery, rather than private businesses.
On the technological front, many companies are already improving their processes so they use and waste less water through innovations like closed-loop factories, which continuously recycle all the water they use. As companies shift away from toxic inputs into their production processes, the water leaving the plant won’t be contaminated and so can be safely used again: this is a huge improvement. One company undertaking these kinds of practices is the carpet manufacturer Interface. Since 1996, under the visionary leadership of CEO Ray Anderson, the company has reduced water intake by 75 percent per production unit in its facilities.69 And they say they aren’t done yet!
THE STORY OF STUFF Page 6