Salvaging Our Most Important Resource

                  The most basic and important compound on Earth is a resource that is constantly overlooked and is steadily disappearing from the hands of the people that need it the most. This essential element to life, is water. Tech Insider reports that our global water crisis is only getting worse. They say that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will struggle to find water, and nearly 1.8 billion people won’t have any at all. How is that possible when areas of the world like Singapore receive about 94 inches of rainfall each year? The answer to that question is waste. Our major cities and global economies don’t have systems set up to collect, store and recycle rain water, but Singapore is beginning to set that standard for the world.

                  The rainy city of Singapore has a vigorous system in place in which half of its land uses gutters, barrels, tanks and reservoirs to capture and store rainwater. You hear words like recycle and you think that we have been recycling for years to try and save our natural resources like oil and natural gas. But why haven’t we done it with water, the most essential resource for living? Millions of people have been dying from dehydration for years but only now we are trying to efficiently recycle rainwater. In Singapore’s advanced system, between 28% and 33% of all non-potable water used in the Changi Airport comes from captured rainwater. This country wide effort has spread to the entire population in which 86% of citizens live in high rise apartments that use capturing systems on the roof.

                  Singapore is merely the start of this rainwater capturing era because people need to realize how important water is and that we can waste it by letting it absorb into the ground and become contaminated in our streets. Tech Insider’s article talks about how Singapore had a clean water crisis in the 1980’s. They started the Seletar-Bedok Water Scheme which is a unique system of reservoirs to save and recycle rain water. But with cities spending money like this on rain capturing systems, how can this help the rest of the world? We know that it is beneficial to countries like Singapore, but they are receiving the rain water needed to store it. What about the desert countries in Africa that don’t have any water to capture? These systems should be set up to help the countries and desert areas that don’t have access to water so that the global society can benefit from these advanced systems. It’s time for countries to work together to stop the global dehydration and salvage our most important resource.

                                                                                      

"Singapore Has Come up with an Ingenious Way to save Water." Tech Insider. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.

"Clean, Green and Blue." Google Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.