Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

ourworldindata.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 94 posts

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#51

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

makeitdouble wrote: post #8

This a truly big problem that has been going surfaced for decades, and I honestly have become split... On one side, France in particular, but many other "developed" nations as well have stepped in to build the infrastructure and provide clean water to places where it was problematic. Only to monopolize water distribution one way or the other, resulting in people not able to afford the water at the end, while losing t…

>Has anyone more than small scale feel good stories or "promising advancements". Do we have things that really improved at scale in the last ten or twenty years ?

Did you read the article?There's a graph right there. The website also has lots of other data, most things are steadily improving.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#52

Post by carlosjobim »

londons_explore wrote: post #13
kccqzy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed that in some countries tap water isn't safe for drinking but good enough for cooking; and everyone buys large plastic 40lb jugs of water for drinking. How much more cost effective would it be to adopt such a system as opposed to safe drinkable tap water?

Non-drinkable tap water is mostly due to water not being available 24x7x365. If a water system is turned off even momentarily, the pressure drops to zero, and sewage and groundwater seep into the water pipes, making it unsafe to drink. Countries with unreliable power grids usually don't have drinkable tap water for that reason. It can also be because the water isn't treated (ie. it is just rainwater in the pipes). Wa…

Just because you can drink the tap water, doesn't mean you want to drink it. Sure, if you are desperate. But most who have the means will prefer to purchase the better tasting and cleaner water from gallons, rather than drinking the treated water from the tap.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#53

Post by andrewmcwatters »

mattmaroon wrote: post #48
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> years In Phoenix, I've never seen a water filter last because our hard water eats them all up faster than in other places in the US. There must be an ideal combination of filtration systems that others use here and elsewhere that I'm not aware of that last for as long as they do, but standard consumer ones that bring TDS down to zero have very little lifespan here. I can't imagine what difficulties exist in areas w…

I have a condo in Phoenix, put in a waterdrop RO filter. I change them on the manufacturers schedule, no issues. The TDS was really high before, but I got over 99% reduction. Not 0 but really close.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll try that out.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#55

Post by londons_explore »

KingMob wrote: post #39
londons_explore wrote: post #16

Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village! The solution is to tell them why clean water matters , and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean . Ie. a water filter. The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water. Th…

> tell them why clean water matters Wow, that's patronizing. Most people without access to clean water are NOT tribes who have never contacted the outside world before. They're people in places with bad infrastructure, poverty, corruption, Nestle lobbying, etc.

Most of these people have lived off their water source all their life. To them, "it's fine".

They'd like it cleaner - but they'd also like their house smarter, their kids better educated, their bike cheaper to run and their roads to have fewer potholes. That's literally what everyone wants.

But without education, they won't realise that the slightly murky water is what caused their child to get sick and die, or that the arsenic poisoning is why they've been low on energy for their whole life and struggle to concentrate in class.

Most people - both in developed and developing nations - don't understand the importance of clean water vs all the other things they'd like in their life.

Heck, in my travels I've met a lot of people who get water from a stream to drink, and even own a water filter, but can't be bothered to use it because it takes a few minutes for the water to seep through.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#56

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

carlosjobim wrote: post #47
pluto_modadic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"far cheaper than providing large amounts" that doesn't factor in the cost of plumbing an entire town with 3 sets. remember photos of the tangle of wires when DC vs AC fought? It's more expensive especially for a suburb of single family homes to plumb in sewers and water mains (long distances for low flows), vs plumbing in duplexes and apartments. having a secondary water system (e.g., purple pipes / grey water), for…

You don't need any plumbing for safe drinking water. It can be delivered to the customer in gallons and bottles. That's how it's done in large parts of the world.

But is that more efficient than having one set of plumbing with safe drinking water? I doubt it. Over here the price difference between drinking water from the tap and the cheapest bottled water is a factor ~200.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#57

Post by londons_explore »

BowBun wrote: post #41
orsenthil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village! This! And this has been true for the last 40 years, when more people didn't have access to water. This just shows how a few people care for the rest, and majority fall along. This was with Cola-Cola from 1980s. Today, it is with information. More people have access to bad news via WhatsApp (like Coke) than edu…

Great comparison. I'm willing to bet that Coke was happy to watch water scarcity continue to drive more people to drink their products. Likewise modern news organizations care less and less about the quality of the news, and more about engagement which results in junk which manipulates emotions.

People going thirsty due to nestle buying it all for bottled water is a western media myth.

It's true that plenty of people have water shortages, but those shortages prevent them from watering their crops - there's still plenty everywhere for drinking - which is what nestle is selling too!

Bottled water is arguably the best thing in places where water is scarce, because very little is wasted, compared to piped systems where leaks account for far more water than what ends up getting drunk.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#58

Post by ToucanLoucan »

mslansn wrote: post #33
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then there is China, and they need to be willing to dance. They need to dance no matter what, let's be real. Be that for the Chinese government, be that for whichever government, be it hearing out some religious org proselytizing at them, be it enduring stupid and infantilizing designs like those water wells that were powered by a children's spinning playground thing, it really isn't that shocking that these places…

They need to dance because they don’t have the intelligence and diligence to do things themselves. It’s not really anybody else’s fault. Beggars can’t be choosers.

"Beggars can't be choosers" for... checks notes clean water.

That's certainly a worldview.

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#59

Post by kccqzy »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #42
londons_explore wrote: post #16

Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village! The solution is to tell them why clean water matters , and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean . Ie. a water filter. The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water. Th…

> years In Phoenix, I've never seen a water filter last because our hard water eats them all up faster than in other places in the US. There must be an ideal combination of filtration systems that others use here and elsewhere that I'm not aware of that last for as long as they do, but standard consumer ones that bring TDS down to zero have very little lifespan here. I can't imagine what difficulties exist in areas w…

In the U.S. you probably don't need TDS to be brought down to zero. My water filtration system at home uses reverse osmosis and brings TDS from 150+ to just 20 and the filter lasts more than a year. (Those that bring TDS down to zero might use deionization instead.)

Re: 2B people don't have safe drinking water: what does this mean for them?

#60

Post by carlosjobim »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #17
jp57 wrote: post #15

I'm disappointed that the article conflates together "safe" and "convenient". Out of the 2B who "don't have safe drinking water", About 1.75B have an "improved source", which is a source that "is not free from contamination, [or] is not on the premises, or [is not] always available." Of course we should work toward a world where everyone has clean, highly available water inside the home, but by conflating "unsafe" wi…

I can see some amount of counter-argument though. If 95% of your drinking water is clean, but then you were thirsty at 2am and you wouldn't have more clean water until someone went 5 miles up the road to the "improved source" to refill buckets, and so you drank some unclean water that was convenient and you got sick... that's still a big problem. Convenience is a safety feature. The safe option has to also be the con…

Usually you notice a few days before when your stock is starting to run out. If you make coffee every day, would you be surprised that you're out of coffee one morning, or would you notice the day before that you need to buy some coffee?
Post reply on HN