By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
About twenty five years ago, it was unthinkable for us to be buying drinking water. Now, water purifying businesses are everywhere. As if there is one every thirty meters on the side of the road, any road—even in remote barangays. Some are just refilling stations, others deliver drinking water in plastic jugs that their customers will just invert into their water dispensers. Some of their containers also have integrated faucets so you could just put it on top of an elevated spot, open the faucet and you have clean drinking water.
Another enterprising Chinoy has stainless tanks mounted on trucks and he delivers tankfuls to middlemen in the city’s suburbs.
As I learned, the drinking water business should go with a laundry business. When purifying water for drinking purposes, you only get about 70% of the water. The rest is thrown away but then that would be a big waste. It could be used for laundry purposes, and that is not only profitable. It is also helping Mother Earth.
This leads me to the next popular business around, laundry. Operators are making a killing especially if they are utilizing water from their own water purification venture. As if the water they are using is free. We know how expensive water is.
With the proliferating laundry business around, only a minority of the population wash their own clothes. More so if water is a rare commodity in a family’s location. If you have to buy the water from water deliverers, might as well have your laundry taken care of by laundry shops which are all over town—there seems to be one in every street corner. The added cost would be reasonable if not minimal.
I mentioned about water deliverers. It is another fully independent business that will keep on growing. You see water delivery trucks everywhere, most of them causing traffic. This just shows how insufficient the water being supplied by the Baguio Water District is. We will be seeing more and more of the private water delivery trucks because the demand is increasing every minute. During summer, if you have to order water from water delivery businesses, chances are the waiting list would be quite long. You might have to wait for a number of days before your turn comes. And this is even if the deliverers are working 24/7.
These water deliverers get their supply by pumping up water from underground. Since the demand is increasing geometrically, their pumps will have to work harder to get more and more from our water table. I would not be surprised when some houses or big buildings would soon be collapsing because of a disappearing water table. While this is a dire prospect, it seems that we cannot rely on the Water District’s supply because the demand for water is just too much. Baguio is so overpopulated beyond reason. While there were plans to get water from out of town, these have remained plans since 1996, if not since time immemorial.
Then there is that booming business that uses a lot of water, the “car wash.” Just like the ones earlier mentioned, car-wash businesses can be seen anywhere. They use a lot of water to wash our cars and the water flows not into septic tanks but into waterways with all the grime, the oil, and all sorts of poison or polluters. But it is very convenient for you and me. But really, such a waste.
If we washed our own cars with water contained in basins or “timba” we would be wasting only a fraction of what the car-wash would use to wash our cars.
Water conservation? Well, it is just so convenient to just drive into a car-wash and for a lousy P100.00 we can just walk away after a few minutes, no sweat.
Yet we have to ask ourselves that question, is there really a need for water conservation? Some food for thought.
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