According to the Environmental Protection Agency, our nation’s 56,000+ community water systems have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build drinking water treatment and distribution systems and another $22 billion per year to operate and maintain them.
There are approximately 1 million miles of pipelines and aqueducts that carry water in the United States and Canada. That’s long enough to circle the earth 40 times.
Public water suppliers process about 38 billion gallons of water each day for domestic and public use.
More than 79,000 tons of chlorine are used every year to treat water supplies in the US and Canada.
Of all the earth’s water, 97 percent is salt water found in oceans and seas; 1 percent is fresh water available for drinking; and 2 percent is currently frozen.
Scientists say that water is recycled by nature over and over; there is no new water being made. That means we have the same amount of water now as when the earth was formed.
About two thirds of the human body is made up of water; 70 percent of the skin is water, and blood is 80-90 percent water.
The first municipal water filtration works opened in Paisley, Scotland in 1832.
More than 13 million households get their water from their own private wells and are responsible for treating and pumping the water themselves.
About 800,000 water wells are drilled each year in this country for domestic, farming, commercial and water testing purposes.
The US average daily requirement for fresh water is about 40 billion gallons a day, with another 300 billion gallons used untreated for agriculture and commercial purposes.
Every man, woman and child in this country uses about 100 gallons of water a day at home.
We can survive for about a month without food, but for only 5 to 7 days without water.
On average, households use about 50 percent of their water for lawn sprinkling. Toilets use the most water inside, consuming about 27 gallons per person per day.
The average 5 minute shower sends about 15 to 25 gallons of water down the drain, but an automatic dishwasher uses only 9 to 12 gallons to clean a load of dishes.
You can refill an 8 oz. glass with water approximately 15,000 times for the same cost as a six-pack of soft drinks.
If every household in the US had a faucet that dripped once each second, we would waste 928 million gallons of water a day.