Gross National Product
Gross national product (GNP) is the market
value of all the goods and services produced in one year by labour and property
supplied by the citizens of a country.
Some facts
There are 300,000 items in the average American home and still many of US citizens rent offsite storage, which very often needlessly supports this segment of industry. The average American woman owns 30 outfits—one for every day of the month. In 1930, that figure was 9.
The average American family spends $1,700 on clothes and then throws away 65 pounds of it annually. Houses have more television sets than people. And those television sets are turned on for more than a third of the day—8 hours, 14 minutes. Americans spend more on shoes, jewellery, and watches than on higher education. Shopping malls outnumber high schools and women will spend more than eight years of their lives shopping.
There far more facts like that. Even though many initiatives has been started to counteract destructive habits, the consumption is having a good time and still growing in numbers of wasted resources. Many people introduce and promote more caring lifestyles like minimalism and offer the society something new, but they end up on a stage or radically interpreted and useless, too few is interested in caring about something more than own household.
Consumption vs Resources
Now let’s change the perspective and look at our basic resource that our lives depend on, water. How it is connected with huge world wide consumption rates?
Water is bottled, flushes our toilets, runs in our households and of course supplies industries. It also appears the freshwater only makes 2.5% of the total volume of the world's water. Considering most of it comes from the ice covers and the fact that we can access only a tiny part of it, makes it a serious future threat.
For many companies it is a major concern and they are working hard to fix it. Overcoming this problem can be done in many ways such as providing proper education, inventing water conservation technologies, improving agricultural practices, developing water policies and regulations.
Here is a nice projection of water extraction and consumption.
Now the questions:
1. Should we change anything
regarding consumption or accumulating goods is in our nature and no point to
bother?
2. Should the
governments make a change even against industries will and profit? What would
you say about raising water prices?
3. What kind of great
inventions have you heard when it comes to water saving?
And resources:
Comments
2. The biggest consumer of water is industry after all. And water deficit could be as dangerous for people as for industry itself. So yes. Governments should try to incentivize companies in some way to optimize their production chain to be more efficient. Raising water prices may be the simplest approach and it’s the one that is being used currently. Whether it works or not it’s hard to tell.
3. I didn’t hear about any great invention recently. And it’s hard to think of something on the spot.
I once heard about LifeStraw, which cleanses water from bacteria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeStraw
Government should consider the opinion of the industry, but it shouldn't serve it. Government's job is to make society good for its citizens so it has to balance opinions of different groups of people. I think that rising water prices would be a bad idea because it would harm the poor people the most.
I heard that there are interesting new technologies that could allow us to filter the salt water at a low cost. If we are able to do that, then out problem is basically solved.
So I think for sure we should do something about it but I have no idea what. I have a lot of things myself that I couldn't really have. When it comes to wasting money and buying things though they don't t really have money, this is my girlfriend. I don't know a second person who on average buys one pair of shoes WEEKLY !! Her shoes are everywhere .I have to take her shoes by hand because she wouldn't notice any of them disappear. She doesn't know what shoes she has. Once I saw that she bought shoes and even didn't walk in them but he must have them. Some people collect stamps, she collects shoes.
2. I don’t consider rising water prices as the best solution in this case as water is the most important essential for human life and it must not be restricted by high prices. Governments should focus on executing environmental policies which help saving natural goods and should impose penalties on companies which do not respect them.
3. I have heard about water harvesting systems which is probably the oldest idea in this area. Water collected and stored in a typical household can be used for watering gardens and after filtering can be used as drinking water
As was mentioned the biggest consumer of water is industry that’s why I consider that water prices should be raised for industries and reduced for everyone else in order to hold a balance.
I haven’t heard about great water saving inventions.
Raising water prices is not a good solution for economy in my opinion. That whould focre price increace of all basic goods and qualtiy of life for all people.
It seems to me that this topic is related to the ecology questions that have been raised more than once and what we need to do to save it, preserve it. Well, my opinion remains the same, everyone can do something personally from themselves, for example, use less water in the shower, wash dishes without spending a lot of water. However, without global changes, at least at the level of one country, namely the country and not the city, in my opinion nothing will change. Well changing price for water as a global change has a hardly predictable results, but still it might one of those global solutions that could change people attitude to water consumption.
2. I could not answer for the government, I was not interested in saving at such a high level. Prices for water can increase not because of the difficulties with the extraction of fresh water, but because for the technical treatment and filtration of water you need many other materials and channels for admission, prices increase for plastics and metal, so filtration becomes more expensive.
3. I have never heard of special inventions; for me, saving is the rational use of the resource.
A good idea. Every industry uses very large amounts of water. Raising the price of water is certainly a solution, but is it certainly a good one? I have no idea..
Unfortunately, I haven't heard of any great ideas about saving water. There are probably ideas but unfortunately I don't know about it.
Well, I'm pretty sure governments are aware of the dangers of such behavior and they do some actions to at least stabilize the current situation regarding resource use. But it is clear that there is no positive effect and raising prices for fresh water is evidence of it.
I've heard about the way of creating water from organic waste. As far as I remember this method was tested in some Scandinavian country but I do not remember details.
I think that industries should be the first to suffer, since they are destroying the nature. Yeah, I know, a lot of work places and other factors, but still, if we will just follow and accept everything that industries want and do, we all gonna die. I think that there is no need to increase price of water. Everybody needs water. Price shouldn't be too high. But i think prices of water for industries that make products that are water-based or include water should be much much higher. I mean nowadays we have a lot of things like beer or cola that costs less than water. And price of such products should be increased dramatically, in my opinion.
I haven't heard anything special. Some unique ways of reusing the water and cleaning it- seems like it's everything that we have for now
Well, accumulating goods is in human nature - for centuries human was traveling without fixed place to be. And we were taking everything, that was useful. But now it should be changed, but not in the "I won't buy more clothes" way, but "I won't turn on every single light in my house, if I don't need to".
Should the governments make a change even against industries will and profit? What would you say about raising water prices?
This is wrong question - change against but in what way? Raising water prices to achieve what? It's much more complicated problem, that it could be solved with the first "good" solution, because it can have complex consequences.
What kind of great inventions have you heard when it comes to water saving?
I didn't heard about any great invention for saving water. But I do hope, there will be a lot in the nearest future.
Yest they should but again they wont. SO when it comes to government there is a think line that should be crossed in order to gimp companies and their profit for the good of environment. But unfortunately money rules our world and as long as politics need money to fund their campaniles our reality wont change.
Greatest invention i heard of was simply NOT WASTING IT, trying to be conscious about how and in what volume u use water.
I don't know any inventions worth mention, but I think in near future water is not going to be a problem for any country, because of techonology and transport development. At least i hope so.
I'm not into the topic, so I haven't seen anything revolutionary recently.