To the thirsty of the world - I apologise

I have a sneaking suspicion that I may have just done something rather abhorrent. Not only that, but I have been doing it for some time without a second thought, up to four and five times a day. It’s not that it is the first time it made me feel a bit naughty or guilty even, but I made the mistake of looking into the issue a bit deeper, although not literally (that denial will make sense in a bit) and it really does seem to be a first world practice that isn’t really garnering the attention it deserves.

First a bit of background.

Last summer in Australia, the summer of 2012/2013, it was the hottest year on record. The Bureau of Meteorology had to add two extra colours to its heat maps to deal with the extreme temperatures, and nearly the whole country was experiencing severe temperatures at the same time. It was pretty hot! We had terrible bush fires (wild fires as they are called in other countries), nasty cyclones and then we had floods just to rub it in.

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, it was a similar story. Droughts, floods, cyclones, storms, cold snaps, you name it, they were on the go somewhere.

But it is the severe drought bit that really strikes a chord, especially in countries that have been ravaged by drought for so long, and are in the midst of serious death tolls as a result of failed crops, dying cattle, and the general horror that such a situation brings with it. Australians are generally pretty sympathetic to drought. It is ingrained in our psyche. Images of dead and mummified sheep and kangaroos dotted about a dried up waterhole are pretty common during summer, and we all know how it feels to be outside on a stinking hot summers day, and the relief a bit of shade and a cold drink can bring!

Which brings me to my actions which are causing my unease. That is, I just flushed about four litres of perfectly good drinking water down the toilet! In Australia! The land that brags about being ‘the sunburnt country”.

In fact, to add insult to injury, I casually pissed in it first, then without a second thought, flushed it away. What a terrible thing to do. It was, prior to my actions at least, clean, clear, presumably treated to the same standard as the water that comes out of the tap in the kitchen that I drink from, from the same pipe redirected under my house to my toilet. Potable in other words, meaning safe for human consumption.

How ridiculous that in a country that is one of the driest on earth, we are so arrogant as to behave in such a disrespectful way. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that about two billion (yes, billion!) litres of fresh water is flushed down the toilets of the nation every single day. In Australia, if you take a look at one city, the nations Capital, Canberra, you can get an idea of the situation. Estimates have put the wastage there at an average of just under 280,000 litres per year, per household.

So, I feel like a should apologise to the masses dying of thirst in sub-Saharan Africa, or dying of disease for want of clean drinking water anywhere in the developing world. Or to farmers watching there livestock suffer, their crops wilt, their livelihoods dry up. I know that my not crapping in perfectly good drinking water and flushing it away won’t make any difference to your plight, but I just hope that as the aspirational masses of the world continue to rise up and meet the middle class ‘values’ of the West, some new thinking entrepreneur can get it right and teach us all a lesson!

Now, I have to go and stop my kids throwing their uneaten school lunch in the bin, and put it in the compost instead. What a ‘first world’ thing to have to do…