Water in our daily lives

 

Photo: Wroclaw, Oder river, Incha Aliyeva

 

Just think for a second, what do you primarily use for tidiness and cleanliness? I am sure for most of us first thing that come to mind is WATER. Water is a symbol of purity and freshness. It is the source of life. One of the chain pillars representing life on Earth is water. Especially freshwater resources are essential for the survival of life on Earth. Close your eyes for a minute and imagine a natural lush green area rich in biodiversity. Following, imagine this green area is completely cut from a water source for 30 days due to global warming, desertification and contamination. Consequently, almost all greenness will vanish within one month. Unfortunately, climate change and global warming are a consequence of various anthropogenic activities,  shortage and contamination of freshwater resources is also included into the list.

How come the resource which is used to make things clean is not clean and pure in itself anymore? So how much are we able to protect this precious resource? Not going into complicated instances I will try to illustrate how in our daily life habits we are directly contributing to water scarcity and contamination.

First, thing first we usually do in the mornings is to go to a toilet, have a shower and brush our teeth. This recurrent habit might have a huge environmental impact if there will not be changes in self-care products humans are using. There is a production phase before these self-care products reach to end-user, which there is also negative environmental impact.

These items made our life easy, clean, and though sometimes we don’t know what is beyond that throwaway after usage. We just want quickly to get rid of whatever trash we have in our house. One of the ways to get rid of residue is to discharge through the drainage system. We think that drainage will take away whatever dirt it is, which might be the case as a short-term solution.

Isn’t strange, the water we use to clean and meet our needs, which eventually becomes dirty, also is essential as a clean commodity for the survival. It is true that water through circulation renews itself constantly, however, if we put into it many chemicals, residues every day, water’s capacity to clean itself is becoming beyond its limit.