While hunting for interesting (and hopefully useful) water news just now we accidentally tripped over a synopsis of a book called The Big Thirst, a book written by Charles Fishman about our planet’s abundance of water, dependance on water, and ironically, its shortage of water.

While the little kid in us found it hilarious that a man with the word ‘fish’ in his name wrote a book about water, the synopsis quickly wiped the smirk off our face and replaced it with a look of awe. In that synopsis on the Water & Wastewater Blog we found this:

  • Water is never destroyed or used up. Today we’re drinking the same water the dinosaurs drank. (Is that Tyrannosaurus Rex pee in your glass?)
  • Water is the lubricant that allows the continents to move.
  • A 150-pound man is 90 pounds water.
  • The average American flushes 18.5 gallons of clean drinking water down the toilet every day.
  • An IBM chip factory in Vermont uses 3.2 million gallons of water a day.
  • In water-short Australia, a single wool processing factory uses 380,000 gallons of water daily.
  • Also in Australia, a farmer pours 6 billion liters of water over 10,450 acres of rice fields.
  • A two-liter bottle of coke takes five liters of water to produce it.
  • 49 percent of water use in the US is for power plants.
  • The electricity you use at home requires 250 gallons of water per person per day.
  • 1 ton of steel takes 300 tons of water.
  • At lift-off the space shuttles used one million gallons of water per minute (not to keep it cool but to buffer it against being shaken apart by the noise).
  • Of the world’s 6.9 billion people, 1.1 billion don’t have adequate water.
  • 5,000 children die every day from lack of water or diseases from tainted drinking water.
( source )

Quite honestly, we already knew about the toilet flushing statistic and the amount of water in a human being, but some of the other statistics blew us away.

If you found yourself as astonished by some of those numbers as we found ourselves, then you, too will probably go and check out what else Mr. Fishman has to say in The Big Thirst.