Nearly 70 percent of world-wide water consumption goes to agriculture while 20 percent goes to industry and 10 percent to home use.

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At present, 1 in 3 people on the planet are facing water shortages. And it is estimated that by 2030, water demands will grow by 1 fourth. By that year, nearly 50 percent of the world's population will be facing severe water shortages.

The United Nations estimates that it would require an additional $30 billion per year to provide clean and safe drinking water to every human on the planet. In 2007, humans spent more than 3 times that on bottled water. The US Government's $787 billion stimulus package would be enough to provide clean and safe drinking water to all of the planet's human occupants for over 26 years.

It has been proven over and again that buying a small home filtration device for as low as $13 can provide tap water that is as clean and safe, and often cleaner and safer, than bottled water—even those from Fiji and France. Instead, water has been privatized and is now a $400 billion industry, making it the third largest industry behind electricity and oil.

US Americans consumed over 30 billion plastic bottles in 2005. That is close to 1000 per second. Only 12 percent of those petroleum-based bottles are recycled. Nearly 50 million barrels of oil are used by plastic bottle producers each year. That is enough oil to fill 3,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools. One small, inexpensive home filtration device can provide nearly 200 liters of clean, healthy water before the filtration cartridge needs changing. Therefore, using one filtration cartridge can prevent 400 small plastic bottles from entering production.

Tap water from home filtration devices costs nearly 4 cents per liter. A 1-liter bottle of Fiji water costs $3.20. That is a difference of 8,000 percent. The environmental consequences are also quite severe as the Fiji production plant runs on diesel fuel 24 hours a day. The plastic bottles themselves make the nearly 10,000 kilometer journey from China to Fiji before being filled with water and traveling the rest of the way to countries all over the world. In addition, it is estimated that nearly 7 liters of water is contaminated in the production of each 1-liter plastic bottle. And it is calculated that each 1-liter bottles of Fiji purchased in the US is responsible for 1/4 of a kilogram of greenhouse gas emissions.

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The average American food product travels 2,400 kilometers before consumption. That is nearly the distance it would require to have my grandmother in Rochester, New York send some of her delicious vegetable soup to my parents in Denver, Colorado.

Over 17 percent of all energy consumption goes to agriculture, with 1 fourth of that energy going to the production, distribution, and consumption of fertilizer. In addition, US Americans consume nearly 475 million kilograms of petroleum-based pesticides per year. That is close to 1.6 kilos, or one 2-liter soda bottle, per person per year.

US Americans average 20.6 million barrels of oil per day. It is estimated that if all US Americans ate one local-grown, organic meal per day, it would save over 1.1 million barrels of oil daily. At $44.76 per barrel, that could save Americans over $18 billion per year.


Sources:

Kingsolver, Barbara, Camille Kingsolver and Steven L. Hopp. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Flow: For Love of Water. Dir. Irena Salina. The Group Entertainment, 2008.

Getting Off the Bottle. Simple Not Easy. November 23, 2008.
http://suresimple.blogspot.com/2008/11/getting-off-bottle.html.

Herbst, Moira. Water Scarcity: Hidden Risks to Business. Business Week. February 26, 2009.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2009/db20090226_538819.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_news+%2B+analysis

Trees on Tap. Nature Inc. BBC. 2008.
http://www.natureinc.org/trees.htm

Petroleum Basic Statistics. Energy Information Administration. 2007.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html

Fiji Water. Wikipedia. March, 2009.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIJI_Water

It's time for environmentalists to take an interest in economics; and for economists to take an interest in the environment.

This year alone, Americans will throw away over 100 billion plastic bags. Nearly all plastic bags are made from polyethylene (a petroleum bi-product) and to make 100 billion plastic bags takes nearly 12 million barrels of oil. 12 million barrels of oil can be refined to nearly 240 million gallons of gasoline. And polyethylene bags take nearly 1000 years to break down into their toxic components. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, there is an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean on the planet. Paper bags take over 4 times as much energy to produce as plastic bags and require about 85 times as much energy to recycle.

At a cost of over 1 penny per bag, Americans are wasting over $1 billion dollars per year. Buying reusable shopping bags eliminates this economic and environmental calamity with a one-time cost of anywhere from $2 for cheap bags to designer bags costing as much as $900 dollars. PlanetFlahive.com is selling hemp shopping bags for $18. Hemp produces about 3 times as much fiber per acre as cotton without the use of pesticides; and while cotton is known for stripping the land of nutrients, hemp naturally fertilizes the soil for future crops. In addition, the cultivation of hemp takes about 100 days whereas cotton trees take between 50 and 70 years to reach full maturity.

Using trash cans unlined with plastic bags take only 1 minute to wash out after dumping!

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Salvador's Coffee House in southwest China uses 38, 30-watt incandescent light bulbs in its daily operations. These light bulbs cost about 1 RMB ($.13) each and last for an average of 3 weeks. 5 of the 38 lights are on for an average of 5 hours, using about 750 watt-hours per day. The other 33 lights are on for an average of 16 hours, using about 15,840 watt-hours per day. So in total, these lights use about 16,590 watt-hours, or 16.59 kilowatt-hours (kWh), per day. At .63 RMB per kWh, lighting the 38 bulbs costs about 10.5 RMB per day, 314 RMB per month, 3,800 RMB ($506) per year. 5-watt compact florescent lights (CFLs) cost about 10 RMB ($1.33) each, can last as long as 7 years, and can replace the 38 incandescent bulbs producing nearly the same luminescence and quality of light. By doing so, the daily electricity consumed by these 38 bulbs is cut down to about 2.77 kWh per day, cutting the daily costs down to 1.74 RMB. This saves our business 3,165 RMB ($422) per year.

According to the American Lighting Association, lights account for 25 percent of household electric bills. This year, Ireland became the 1st country in history to pass legislation banning the normal incandescent light bulb, thus promoting the longer-lasting, energy-efficient fluorescents.

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Starbucks goes through over 2.3 billion paper cups per year. The average paper cup with lid, graphics, and stirrer comes to about $0.15 per cup. For those who drink a cup a day, they will burn through over $50 per year on non-biodegradable waste. In 2003, Starbucks began offering a 10 cent discount to those who bring their own mugs or take-away reusable cups. This encouraged about 13.5 million customers to bring in their own mugs, thus saving about 586,800 pounds of paper from going to US landfills. Starbucks could save an estimated $1 million per year in packaging costs by encouraging the use of reusable cups and plates.

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The average bite of food in America has traveled nearly 1,500 miles. Most foods are transported in semi-tractor trailers that have a maximum capacity of 40,000 pounds according to US law. 40,000 pounds of food is 640,000 bites assuming 1 bite to be equivalent to 1 ounce. A semi-tractor trailer gets an average of about 5.5 miles per gallon, fully loaded. Traveling 1,500 miles at full capacity would burn about 272 gallons of diesel (roughly 34,900 ounces). So that means that every 18 bites of food are chased down with a shot of diesel. At 3.3 dollars per gallon of diesel, shopping locally can save American consumers about 1 penny for every 7 bites.

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In a small town in Sicily, refuse disposal has recently shifted from small garbage trucks, which cost around $150,000, to donkey-carts, which cost $1,000. Whereas operational costs for the trucks cost around $12,000 per year, it only costs $3,000 per year to feed the donkey. To equal the amount of exhaust created from 1 garbage truck, 1 donkey would have to have some serious digestive issues.



Sources:

McKibben, Bill. Carbon's New Math. National Geographic. October, 2007. Pp. 33-37.

BBC News. December 7.

Flahive, Colin. Issue 2 – The Tickle Me Elmo Equation. Simple Mathematics. December, 2006. www.simple-mathematics.com.

Weekly Retail On-Highway Diesel Prices. Energy Information Administration. December 17, 2007.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/wohdp/diesel.asp.

The Throwaway Generation: 25 Billion Styrofoam Cups a Year. The Environmental Magazine. November-December, 2005.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1594/is_6_16/ai_n15895175.

How Much Do Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Really Cost? Get Rich Slowly. October 29, 2007.
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/10/29/how-much-do-compact-fluorescent-bulbs-really-cost/.

Plastic Bags, the Convenient Sack That Never Goes Away. Practical Environmentalist. August 10, 2007.
http://www.practicalenvironmentalist.com/anti-conservation/plastic-bags-the-convenient-sack-that-never-goes-away.htm.

Drowning in a Sea of Plastic Bags. School of Natural Resources and Environment. Fall, 2007.
http://snre.ufl.edu/Pubs&Event/Source/fall07/plastic.html.

Our View on the Environment: Plastic-Bag Ban Full of Holes. USA Today. April 7, 2007.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/04/post_1.html.

www.planetflahive.com.