Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village!

The solution is to tell them why clean water matters, and provide them a cheap way of making dirty water pretty clean. Ie. a water filter.

The cheapest water filters, costing perhaps $10 and able to filter a family drinking water supply for years, will still eliminate most concerning contamination in water.

The best water filters - pumped reverse osmosis systems - are still only a few hundred dollars, and will also give a family drinking water for many years.

In thailand for example, vending machines exist which cost a few cents to use and will dispense a few liters of filtered water. These help spread the cost of the expensive filter between people and across time.

View on HN

> years

In Phoenix, I've never seen a water filter last because our hard water eats them all up faster than in other places in the US. There must be an ideal combination of filtration systems that others use here and elsewhere that I'm not aware of that last for as long as they do, but standard consumer ones that bring TDS down to zero have very little lifespan here.

I can't imagine what difficulties exist in areas with access to clean water, but I can't expect them to all also be easily filtered outside of processes like solar distillation or something else.

I have a condo in Phoenix, put in a waterdrop RO filter. I change them on the manufacturers schedule, no issues. The TDS was really high before, but I got over 99% reduction. Not 0 but really close.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll try that out.

In the U.S. you probably don't need TDS to be brought down to zero. My water filtration system at home uses reverse osmosis and brings TDS from 150+ to just 20 and the filter lasts more than a year. (Those that bring TDS down to zero might use deionization instead.)

In case anyone else is wondering, "TDS" is Total Dissolved Solids. I had to look that one up.

> Most of these people are not cut off from the world. You will find a coca-cola bottle in the same village!

This! And this has been true for the last 40 years, when more people didn't have access to water. This just shows how a few people care for the rest, and majority fall along. This was with Cola-Cola from 1980s.

Today, it is with information. More people have access to bad news via WhatsApp (like Coke) than education (like safe drinking water).

Great comparison. I'm willing to bet that Coke was happy to watch water scarcity continue to drive more people to drink their products. Likewise modern news organizations care less and less about the quality of the news, and more about engagement which results in junk which manipulates emotions.

People going thirsty due to nestle buying it all for bottled water is a western media myth.

It's true that plenty of people have water shortages, but those shortages prevent them from watering their crops - there's still plenty everywhere for drinking - which is what nestle is selling too!

Bottled water is arguably the best thing in places where water is scarce, because very little is wasted, compared to piped systems where leaks account for far more water than what ends up getting drunk.

> tell them why clean water matters

Wow, that's patronizing.

Most people without access to clean water are NOT tribes who have never contacted the outside world before. They're people in places with bad infrastructure, poverty, corruption, Nestle lobbying, etc.

I'm sure it's applicable to some. This is too big and widespread a problem for one-size-fits-all anything.

Well GP listed like, 6 things. I have to agree with them that the vast majority of people without access to water are not so disconnected from the world that they don't understand the important of clean water.

I mean yes but they also still don’t think it matters. It’s a thing they consider just part of life. It’s like how a lot of Americans don’t wash hands, a lot of the world still smokes, etc.

You find plenty of democracies around the world with unsafe drinking water and no politicians really talking about it because the people just don’t care.

Most of these people have lived off their water source all their life. To them, "it's fine".

They'd like it cleaner - but they'd also like their house smarter, their kids better educated, their bike cheaper to run and their roads to have fewer potholes. That's literally what everyone wants.

But without education, they won't realise that the slightly murky water is what caused their child to get sick and die, or that the arsenic poisoning is why they've been low on energy for their whole life and struggle to concentrate in class.

Most people - both in developed and developing nations - don't understand the importance of clean water vs all the other things they'd like in their life.

Heck, in my travels I've met a lot of people who get water from a stream to drink, and even own a water filter, but can't be bothered to use it because it takes a few minutes for the water to seep through.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com