Published on March 28 2015
Article from the St. Catharines Standard
With so much water being available, and because the price we pay for it is low, most Canadians fail to appreciate the contribution water makes to our society, economy and ecosystems, says Brock University Professor Steven Renzetti.
“If you have ever gone camping or gone to a cottage and you’ve had to carry in water even for a 100 metres then you suddenly know you can’t live without it and you are glad that someone else is doing the pumping,” said Renzetti, a member of the school’s Department of Economics.
Sunday was World Water Day and the theme this year was “Water and Sustainable Development.” Increasingly, community groups, companies, First Nations and governments are partnering with academic researchers to study water challenges and to propose practical solutions that can be implemented.
Canadians waste water, said Renzetti, and that’s because households and small businesses don’t pay the full cost of what it costs to supply clean water. Large firms that “self-supply” their water needs by simply sticking a pipe in the river and taking what they need also only pay a small fraction of what that cost should be.
“You don’t have a lot of incentives not to waste water,” said Renzetti, adding that most companies worry more about saving money on labour and energy instead of water.
“If you look back 20 or 30 years you will see that we didn’t get serious about energy until the price tripled. We are not suggesting that we want to do that with water,” he said, but we need to think more about conserving and making better use of what we have.
The average consumer can start small by tightening the taps around the house, reminding your kids to turn off the tap, retrofitting toilets and showers, to bigger things such as installing a rain barrel at home or companies getting involved with internal water recirculation so that each cubic foot of water is used several times instead of once.
When compared to other countries from around the world, Canadians do not pay a lot for their water, said Renzetti, and we are probably close to the bottom third on that list.
Consumers need to think more about when and how they use their water, said Renzetti, who is also a member of the Science Priority Committee of the International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes Science Advisory Board, and author of numerous articles and books….
