09 Mar 10 Learn something new no.5 – Water (and a bit about me and David Bellamy) | #LearnSomethingNew

A long time ago, David Bellamy and I knew each other vaguely. He was a big fan of Rohan (clothing) and given that he was a regular on TV back then (late 80s), we were happy to clothe him and even took some inverted pride in his ‘Worst Dressed Man’ award. As Rohan’s Marketing Manager, it was part of my job to send all the gear to him. I later wrote articles in magazines, including one entitled ‘How Green Is Your Clothing’ for Outdoors Illustrated. I rang David to get his view on the subject and he kindly gave me an hour on the phone tutoring me in why cotton, natural as the plant is, can actually be an environmentally disastrous crop. The reason? It take 17 tons of water to produce 1 ton of cotton – cotton production is the reason that the Aral Sea in Russia effectively dried up.

Remembering this, I thought  few other facts about the planet’s life giving fluid might be worth learning:

• It takes 120 gallons of water to produce one egg.
• A person can survive without food for more than 30 days, but less than a week without water.
• A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds.
• For every 2.31 feet that water is raised above the earth’s surface it can create one pound per square inch of pressure.
• The average household uses 107,000 gallons of water per year.
• It takes 1,851 gallons of water to refine one barrel of crude oil.
• It takes 1,500 gallons of water to process one barrel of beer.
• 95 percent of the world’s cities still dump raw sewage into their water supplies. Thus it should come as no surprise to know that 80 percent of all the health maladies in developing countries can be traced back to unsanitary water.