How important is Clean Water and Sanitation in our lives?

In my first blog post, I wrote about my interest in researching the issues and solutions to clean water and sanitation. The issues of clean water and sanitation would impact our future generations. Our environment would change drastically and many people would have the freedom to use as much water as they need as we solve this problem. I envision clean streets and the scent of fresh air as we fix the problem of proper sanitation in many countries.

I was interested in gathering the opinions of different people regarding the importance of clean water and sanitation in our everyday lives. I conducted a survey with many students that attended University at Buffalo. I asked some students who were in my class group chats as well as UB students on reddit. I asked them the question, How important is clean water and sanitation in our lives from a scale of 1 to 10?

This chart represents the data from the sample size of 48 students attending the University At Buffalo. I was surprised that there were many people who voted 7 because the importance of clean water and sanitation would be around 9–10 in my opinion. The environment would be very different if we do not value these resources, as many countries as struggling with unsanitary communities and a lack of clean water.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but I was interested in discovering some of the reasons why some may not value clean water and sanitation as highly. I also included questions in my survey that asked people with a score lower than 8 about why they wouldn’t value clean water and sanitation as high. Some people may not value clean water and sanitation as highly because they may prioritize other resources such as electricity or food. Many of us use clean water everyday in ways such as showering, brushing our teeth, washing our hands, and quenching our thirst. The impact of clean water is huge because it heavily reduces the rate of contracting diseases and it is essential in our agricultural production of crops. Countries during the pandemic who are struggling with clean water and sanitation would be struggling even harder because the virus would spread like wildfire without proper prevention measures like being sanitized. Our society in America is so numb to using clean water that we don’t value it as much, even though many people in certain countries have limited access to clean water. As the world is getting bigger and the population increases, proper sanitation would be even harder because many people are ignorant and dump trash and plastic on the floor. The world would be different if everyone had access to clean water and met proper sanitation guidelines.