this has gone off topic somewhat, but the debate about water is a good one.
interesting fact - apparently it takes 23 ltrs of water to make one 500ml bottle of coca-cola!! (water used in cooling machines etc), water is the most plentiful natural resource we have and the natural cycles that take place every day are constantly regenerating it.
Any factory making drinks coca cola or otherwise use an absolutely prodigious volume of water every day.
HUGE
They would only have to turn off the taps for an hour and they would save more water in that time than all the WFP windows cleaners in the same county would use in 12 months.
A local brewery uses many millions of litres of water per year.
How many WFP window cleaners are there in your town? Half a dozen??
The average WFPer uses about 250l per day.
I'm from Chepstow, and I only know of 4 window cleaners who live in our town that have WFP.
Of the 4 of us I reckon I use the most water, and I rarely use much more than 300 litres a day.
How much water do you reckon the man on the street will use when he washes the car and uses his garden hose connwected to the mains?
With the tap full on and if he (or she) takes ten minutes to clean the car they will use more water than I will use in a day of window cleaning.
Though the summer in an average town of 10,000 people I wonder how many of them get the hose out to wash their car on any given day?
Even worse of course is the householder who has the garden sprinkler going for a few hours watering the lawn.
Just one individual in a town of 10,000 people will will use more water in that single day than I would use in a month, and of course it will never be just the one householder washing his car (or hers) or watering the lawn.
WFP use is barely a drop in the ocean.
And nobody compares even closely to the water companies themselves
Over the last 25 years water lost through leaks has actually gone up and not down
How the hell can that happen?
?
Since the big drought of 76 you would have thought the alarm bells would have rang loud and clear, but no...the shareholders and not the customer come first, profit, profit, profit!
It incenses me when these morons advertise on telly and tell me to conserve water when they waste it like it is going out of fashion.
A month or 2 ago I was working in a street (Kingsmark Avenue for any Chepstow guys reading this) that had a big leak.
Not slaging off the water company here by the way, they had someone there to check it out within an hour or so.
But at one point he opened up some mains valve in the street while he checked out the leak further down the street.
This was gushing out water for perhaps 10 or 15 minutes, I've no doubt it was sone for a specific reason, so once again this isn't a dig a the guy who did it.
But my god! it was like a river!!
In just those ten or fifteen minutes many thousands of litres of water went spewing out into the roads and down the gutters.
The leak itself, which was lower down the road was repaired in a day or two, which was a pretty quick response time I thought, but for every minute of the time that main was leaking it was pushing out way more water than you could do if you had all the taps turned on in your house!
And there are tens of thousands of these leaks happening all the time.
WFP wasteful ?? No way.
Ian
