do it for the living and do it for the dead, do it for the monsters under your bed, do it for the teenagers and do it for your mom

i remember having a conversation with two friends last year about drinking water from the bathroom sink. one said she did it all the time, the other thought it was the grossest thing in the world. "i'm sure it's clean... enough, but ew. i don't drink tap water," was how she described it. while we are discussing the possible grossness of drinking tap water, 38,000 kids are dying every week because they can't get any clean water to drink, which, by the way, was declared a human right by the UN. a lot of people i know, including my friend, drink bottled water instead. (the US, Mexico, and China use more bottled water than anywhere else, with the US using an average of 200 bottles per person per year. 86% of these are never recycled. read this for more bottled water information. there's even a video to watch at the end of that page.)

now, i'm not telling you all to stop drinking bottled water and switch to tap (or buy yourself a brita filter) to save the world (except that i totally am). instead, i'm just going to open your eyes to a few ways you're spending water every day that you probably didn't know about (i know a lot of these came as a surprise to me):

[one] charging an iPhone uses up half a liter of water (power plants don't run on love). on an average day, a US power plant will use 500 billion liters of fresh water. (can't grasp how much that is? well, it's more than double what flows through the Nile.)

[two] look at you're outfit. it takes 1,800 gallons of water to grow enough cotton for one pair of jeans, and 400 gallons of water to grow enough cotton for a plain cotton shirt.

[three] think about what you eat in a day - the normal stuff. that is all using way more water than you think. it takes 200 liters of water to produce one cup of milk, 140 liters for a cup of black coffee (53 gallons to make a to-go latte), 185 liters to make a bag of chips, 135 liters for an egg, and a whopping 2,400 liters for just one hamburger. (and no, i'm not talking about a big mac or a triple whopper with cheese.)

[four] it takes 39, 090 gallons of water to make a car. each tire requires 518 gallons of water to be made.

when you're using that much water without even realizing it, do you really want to waste extra water by not turning off the faucet while you brush your teeth or taking showers that span hours?

interesting fact: more people have access to a cell phone than a toilet. (that means water is getting contaminated with sewage.)

interesting fact number two: unsafe drinking water kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war.

why the sudden interest in water? it's Blog Action Day and the water issue is this year's topic. it's a much bigger issue than you may think (you know, if you live under a rock or in a cloud of self-involvement or something). so make yourself useful and get off your computer that is using way to much water to be powered and go dig till you find a spring or well or something. or, you could just spread the word, try to use less water, and maybe donate to a water cause?

*Loose Lips - Kimya Dawson