Excellent! - excellentdevelopment.com

Excellent Development have found that sand dams are the cheapest source of water known to man, cheaper even than UK tap water.

Choosing World Water Day to highlight the issue, Simon Maddrell, Executive Director of Excellent Development UK commented, “Sand Dams are reinforced concrete walls built by communities across seasonal rivers in semi-arid Africa. They cost around £6,000 to build and can hold an incredible two million litres of usable water – that’s an incredible 0.3p per litre.”

“What’s even more incredible, is that sand dams refill every rainfall season – and last at least 30 years. So that’s less than a hundredth of a penny per litre over the lifetime of the dam!”

A sobering thought when one compares this to the costs of bottled mineral waters and tap water available to the UK public.
• Excellent Development studied 57 different brands of bottled mineral water available in the UK. The median price was 76p per litre – that’s 7,600 times more expensive than sand dams.2
• The most expensive in the study, Bling H20, from the Great Smokey Mountains in America, is sold at a staggering £59 per litre – 590,000 times more expensive.2
• In 2006, Britons spent over £1.6 billion on bottled water.
• Even UK households pay on average 0.25p per litre for their tap water – twenty-five times more expensive.

Excellent Development’s Advocacy Manager, Ian Neal, added, “The world is fast approaching the limits of fresh water supply. Today one person in five has no access to safe drinking water – that’s 1.1 billion people. With the situation worsening in many countries because of climate change, it is vital that innovative and appropriate technologies such as sand dams be brought to bear on the problems of world water supply.”

Ian added, “When one considers that 81% of mineral water is supplied in plastic bottles and 26% is sourced from outside the UK from countries as far away as Fiji – the external costs of mineral water on the environment and the world’s climate is even higher, a cost increasingly being borne by impoverished farmers in Africa.”

Simon Maddrell added, “Sand dams are low cost because the technology is so simple and appropriate – but also because the communities themselves contribute their time and labour to collect locally available materials and to construct the dams themselves. This ensures ownership and sustainability – but more importantly keeps millions of litres of water in dry areas, which would otherwise be lost to the oceans.”

Simon concluded, “Not only do sand dams provide the lowest cost supply of clean water – they transform the environment and reverse the impacts of global warming on the most vulnerable families in dry land Africa. I urge people to support us in bringing clean water to farmers in Africa – for £6 you can give someone water for life. Or you can drink 8 bottles of mineral water yourself!”