The Story of Stuff - Annie Leonard [24]
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