Wasting water in Italy

Just imagine this. You’re walking through Venice in the hot sun, it’s about 35 degrees Celsius. You’d kill just to drink some water. Not just at that specific moment, but at any given time during the day. Then, like a dream, you see a small water fountain you can drink from, so you fill your bottle and drink all the water you can.

Sounds perfect, right? Problem is, it’s not that perfect at all. The water from the fountain is on al day, so there’s a continuous flow of water, while it’s only a tap for drinking water. Most of the time there’s no one there, sometimes a little girl will take a shower at the tap, and sometimes people fill up their bottle. The rest of the time all the water goes to waste, it just flows away and it hasn’t been of use to anybody.

There are taps like these all over Rome and Venice, in total probably hundreds of them in just these two cities. This means millions of liters of drinking water are going to waste every single day.

Water that could have been used to grow food. Water that could have been used to save a farmers harvest. Water that is starting to be scarce all over the world, and here it just flows away.

We can’t just waste things like this in a world with over 7 billion people. We need water and food, and we just can’t throw it away, especially not when it’s so easy not to let it go to waste. By putting a button on very tap, less water would be wasted, and we would be a little closer to living in a more sustainable world.